Tongue, performance at South London Gallery, 2006
Commissioned for Mothership Collective exhibition curated by Harold Offeh, written and directed by Eloise Calandre.
Tongue is a multi-lingual performance, with script exploring perception through language. Tongue aims to create an immersive space as performers are seated among the audience. The performance plays with what can be understood from intonation of the voice without deciphering words, with sections overlapping 12 different languages. Derived from the concept of feeling alien in your own environment and exploring the function of language in busy social spaces, where a cacophony of voices can suddenly expel a singular audible sentence. This pieces creates layers of linguistic proposition and liminal encounter.
full English script:
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written and directed by Eloise Calandre
1 Hemi (turkish)
Speak to me. Tell me something.
2 Yuriko (japanese)
I speak to you behind a shield of words you cannot understand. This way I can tell you anything. I can tell you how much I long to love you, to live to be you, to feel your sense.
3 Michaela (czech)
I, she, he, they, you
4 Yuriko (japanese)
Find us
5 Michaela (czech)
Something of you is inside, where language is on the outside. Words escape me.
6 Maria (portugese)
Voice carried on the wind, come and goes, like a chorus, an angel or ghost, surging into presence and then gone. Imagined. Forgotten. Language I don't understand enters me with soothing touch. Words are lost. I hear the mouth. I feel a sense of the body undone.
7 Didi (mandarin)
You can hear me, but you can’t hear me.
8 Hemi (turkish)
Whisper something to me, without tone. A voice with no identity. The voice is the aural identity of the body composite. Intonation speaks of personality.
9 Michaela (czech)
Speak to me, tell me something good.
10 Mona (german)
Laughter is a universal language, as is crying, neither can be translated. All sounds transcend words, our enunciation is our individual language of self expression.
11 Hemi (turkish)
Where people don't go.I walk through the forest, through the shadow. The corner of my eye sees movement. I feel a breath behind me. Scratching on the ground, crumbling under foot. A surge of heat in the icy wind, transparent calling in the air. This is where people don't go.
12 Stamatina (greek)
Where passion lives.I gaze into eternal blue. Striding through light backed by shadow. Shadows tell of whispers long. The light illuminates all life. The sun soothes and understands, but shall never falter for sorrow. This is where passion lives.
13 Julinka (polish)
Where indecision grows. Awaking with full heart in the morning, blessed by sanctuary. Taste harbours change, and dust becomes apparent. I shy away and hesitate. I feel a longing to be free. This is where indecision grows.
14 Julia (french)
Where to find languageI cut myself, by accident. Informed by pain, a curse of tears. Still I find myself the same. To know love is consciousness. This is where to find language.
15 Hemi (turkish)
Where I live. Among the flowers and the trees. In the sea and through the air. In your arms, in these four walls. In my skin and love alone. Behind these eyes and breathing tone. Below the earth and flowing roots.This is where I live.
16 Michaela (czech)
A kiss,Please, A kiss
17 Julinka (polish)
To be forgotten
18 Elin (swedish)
All is forbidden
19 Didi (mandarin)
I'm drawing shapes in your consciousness.
20 Stamatina (greek)
This is a subconscious regurgitation of everything that has entered me. All emotions and learning. All words and media and love and rationality. All wrong, all anxiety, all research and sustenance, everything shared and everything forgotten. This is who I am, sometimes, passing through me.
21 Didi (mandarin)
Lies offer a truth hidden, desires are far fetched.
22 Elin (swedish)
Superfluous annotations. Story book drawings touching my chest like thistles. Running through a time brushing against my ankles, which now crack in heels on stairs, careful footsteps of precocious beauty, never made for life encased. Chosen wild and then matured. Make hasty sex and love with too much body, only to know lack of control over all. Want me. Deny you. Catch a sting. Bruises are missed. Always hungry.
23 Julia & Stamatina (french)
It's a curious confinement I seek and suffer to find you. I steal a glance at you. A stolen intimacy that you do not see. Through la jalousie I see myself looking, we are both outside.
24 Julia & Hemi (french & turkish)
Speak to me. Tell me something good.
25 Yuriko (japanese)
A word that describes that compelling sensation, involuntarily, simultaneously compelling and repelling in terms of one's own subjectivity. Describe a feeling inside the body, physical. Mentally it seems always to remain partially hidden, so that it controls, rather than becoming understood. It excites. It leads, like a horse's nose bag.
26 Didi (mandarin)
I hide behind words
27 Maria (portugese)
Speak with wet lips and let me hear your taste
28 Julia (french)
Hidden from sense of syntax understood, but at the same time revealed the sexual nature of the voice, the internal sensual organ of the mouth, the throat, the lips.
29 Michaela (czech)
Help me Leave me alone
30 Maria (portugese)
Kissing time
31 Sofia (slovenian)
Wait for me. I'll tell you something else. Something New. Another time. Another time.
