Josef Sprinzak

Bed ttme stories & Lullabies

A series of intimate performances in the family house of the surrounding villages of Gralhalheira region, witnessed by their children and parents. As a performer and sound vocal artist, Josef Sprinzak went to private sleeping places, taking over a role between the music-poet / story-teller and the “stranger” that executes vocal and ritual pieces in foreign languages-mainly Hebrew, English and unrecognizable languages. The performance in a sleeping room, is a format that explores the voice in a context situated between the artistic and the functional – the recognizable and the strange. The sessions had an interactive character to it that ended up exceeding the pattern of the atrical relations of performer/public, transforming it into “events”, in the sense of traditional visual performance art. These “events” in the sleeping rooms are conducted through the use of portable sound objects and sources, visual acts and exchange/switch of rules between the participants and the performer.

Josef Sprinzak is a performer and sound artist who lives and works in Tel Aviv. His professional accomplishments include habilitations in Computer Sciences, Visual Theater and Vocal Work. Sprinzak is among the first textual poets/sound artists in Israel, and his work consists in precise language annotations, recorded discourse, vocalizations, corporal gestures, spatial movement relations, all dealing with private and collective identity, the relations between language and history, conscience and memory.