Alice Hui-Sheng Chang & Nigel Brown

12 Dog Cycle

In coming to Nodar we wanted to engage with the young people living in the region and consider their relationship to local myths and stories.Voice, the principal carrier of stories, is also afield for experimentation and play that we planned to explore with the people we met. Our hope was to extend connections through the imagination, and embody stories through the voice.

Our starting point was an open invitation to meet for a storytelling session. As outsiders, we wanted to create a situation that encouraged a genuine knowledge exchange between the participants, with our selves acting as little more than audience. In the days preceding the workshop, Luis Costa of Binaural took us around to local villages, meeting whoever may have been working a field, relaxing on their front steps or drinking at the local bar. Discussions during these encounters resulted in a collection of possible topics for the workshop.

The workshop happened in a community hall in Sequeros, underneath a stage that hosted bands for the local carnival. Gathered storytellers, overwhelmingly the senior female residents of Sequeros, poured forth the collective memory of the locality: carnivals, sorcerers, witchcraft, tungsten mines, dance troupes, snakes, unexplained lights, fires, travellers and pilgrimages. The small group of assembled teenagers, from Nodar, Sequeros and Ameixiosa, knew some of the stories, but their contributions and questions indicated a genuine engagement and curiosity.

Following the storytelling session, we facilitated anumber of group voice workshops with the teenagers. In finding common ground without language, we focussed on Alice’s practice of extended vocal technique as a means of representing the shared stories. The possibilities of non-lingual voice became our shared exploration ground, with the stories forming a frame of reference for imagination and play. The group responded with powerful enthusiasm, running with our free-associative approach to the stories to create abstracted interpretations.

Attempting to familiarise ourselves with the landscapes and spaces of the region, along side the workshops we under took short explorations of listening and sounding. Using the instruments most familiar to us, voice and piano accordion, we made a series of recordings around Nodar and its surroundings, engaging with the particular acoustics and sounds of each location. Just as we aimed for an embodying of stories through voice, we hoped for a physical connection to the spaces of Nodar through the tactile feedback of sounding. Most memorable of these is perhaps the under and above water River Paiva vocal recordings, simultaneously enjoying the response how l of a local dogand the nibbling of tiny river fishon ourlegs.

Our final meeting with our teenage friends took place at the performance site; reflective rock cliffs and stone bridge arches creating a unique acousticon the bank of the River Paiva. The performance was conceived as are imagining of local history and myths through the minds and voices of its youth.The river it self was the resting point for the giant serpent that had worked its way from the story tellers’ memories into the centre of the performance we created with our young collaborators.

Alice Hui-Sheng Chang (Taiwan) and Nigel Brown (Australia) work as 12 dog cycle, extending the voice through extreme unconventional technique and the accordion through modifications and pickups.

They have performed in East Asia, Europe and Australia at festivals including Vozes de Magaio, Portugal; Santander Art Sonoro, Spain; Elsie Else, France; Kuandu Arts Festival and tranSonic,Taiwan; 2pi, China; Liquid Architecture, The now Now and Electrofringe, Australia. Their recorded works have been published by Trente Oiseaux (Germany), Ecosono (USA) and Mind Twisting Records (Poland).