Mouth hugging growling – “DUNKEL” by Olivia Rivière and Lisen Pousette – (ICE HOT 4)

Karin Hald
12. juni 2024

At the dance festival Ice Hot Nordic Dance 2024, I was excited to go and see Dunkel, a choreographic work by Olivia Rivière and Lisen Pousette. In a dimly lit room, we gathered around a square stage, and waited before an echo of mouth hugging growling began.

Karin Hald [KH]: How did you two start this collaboration and how has the process been? As DUNKEL seems to draw on inspiration from quite different modalities – how did you work on creating this web of interconnections?

Olivia Rivière & Lisen Lisen Pousette: Our collaboration began in 2017. However, our friendship and shared past goes way back and explains how we came to work the way we do. From the age of 11 – 16, we went to the same choir elementary school in Stockholm, a special kind of school where the students have at least one choir lesson per day. We knew of each other but didn’t know each other well. Later, as teens, we became close friends when we began the same dance gymnasium. Years of shared and different dance educations passed. Entering the studio together in 2017, now as both friends and colleagues in the field, it was natural for us to begin exploring the voice, curious about the years of vocal practice stored in our bodies.

At the same time, we wanted to go as far away from the classical choir singing as we could, and growling became the first entry point into the world of extended vocal techniques. It is such a physical practice that we immediately found fascinating and that spoke to themes we wanted to explore. From then, we began to unfold different choreographic materials that all departed from embodied growling and a few other voices, we felt had a strong materiality to them. This resulted in our first full length work together, Ever Losing in 2019. Elements that became, and still are, central to our work, are interests in the somatics of the voice, viscerality, affect and the materiality of sound.

In the process of Ever Losing, we got the idea to create a group piece together, it was as if the practice called for it. Dunkel became the answer to that.

In Dunkel, we wanted to create a sort of choreographic choir, dizzying the acoustic dimensions and what sound comes from where and who, and play with the potential the group offers. We wanted to blur the contours of the individual, making the sound seem to emanate from all parts of- and across bodies. When creating Dunkel we had been working with growling for a few years, nerding, and it became even more about deconstructing both practice and sound materiality. As sound theorist Brandon LaBelle puts it, growling locates “the mouth back into the chest, and back toward the ground”. At the same time growling is an ecstatic outward going energy. We wanted to work with these stretches. When you unfold the practice, you realize it is all about breath: underneath the aggressive sound dimension there is an incredibly ‘airy’ sound, like an airy operatic voice. A ‘dopey sound’. So growling is both something dark and heavy as well as something ungraspable and light as a down duvet – these were some of the entry points for the work with Dunkel.

In the process of Ever Losing, we got the idea to create a group piece together, it was as if the practice called for it. Dunkel became the answer to that.

KH: When I saw the work at IceHot, what also came to my mind was how Dunkel seemed to play with and nuance the female body, gaze and how a group of women engaged with each other? There was something queer about it, especially when the performers would growl into each other’s mouths and sense and use vibration from their open mouths meeting.

Olivia & Lisen: Yes, we absolutely also work with skewing/expanding – and as you phrase it very well; nuancing the female-identified body through these voices. Through the acoustic reach, the voice blurs/crosses the borders of the body. An effect even more enhanced when working with a group. There is so much force, intensity, and texture in these voices. Being inside the work, we become completely succumbed and other senses than the sight become involved, taking over the gaze. For us, it is as much about listening as seeing.

We were also exploring the reciprocal relationships this vocal work creates; the voices expand the reach of the body, touching the acoustic space as well as the fleshy space of the mouth, and other visceral places of oneself and the others. In the process of Dunkel we were inspired by the French writer and thinker Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body, and in general inspired by a tradition of feminist thinkers, writers and artists that deal with themes such as the bodily, vulnerable, fleshy, erotic, grotesque – challenging the typical idea and myth of ‘woman’.

Continuing the line of Wittig’s Lesbian Body and the fleshy space of the mouth: a word that resonates very well with our work and that we frequently return to is ‘visceral’. Stemming from old French and Latin it has multiple meanings as both ‘affecting deep inward feeling’ and internal organs/inner parts of the body. This encompasses both the somatic work with the voice, the diaphragmatic pulse, and the effect this type of voice works produces.

During the last year, in the process of our latest work Spiritus (2024) we moved even more towards the idea of deep listening to the other and oneself. A bit away from the physical and fleshy contact, and more towards states and moods of listening, both mundane and ecstatic.

Screenshot from the movie by Nemo Stocklassa Hinders

KH: Reading your thoughts, I start to think together with the Italian philosopher Adriana Caverero, who has written For more than one voice – towards a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, where she meditates upon the voice in a context of feminist theory, drawing on the Sirens to the Muses, from Echo to opera singers. In Dunkel it is almost like an echo is growling into each other’s bodies. And in this sense the voice is both singular and plural. If your work were to be an echo, resounding back to you, what would you hope would come back?

Olivia & Lisen: Glad you bring up Cavarero, and especially this work of hers that you mentioned, as it is definitely close to our hearts and has accompanied and broadened our horizons on voice and its historically gendered properties, since a few years back when we first came across her.

We once put it quite romantically that we wanted to experience another kind of beauty. A beauty so powerful and weird it would change our lives. A frenzied, wet, unknown resonance.

Since an echo can be a mimetic resounding as well as a disembodied, sort of haunting and estranged resonance, we’d go for Dunkel coming back as the most intimate reverberation.

We wanted just that, the more than one voice to come back to us.