Emerge from the Totality of Blackness

28th Jan 2023 28th Jan 2023 19:00 20:00

Christina Wheeler

00:00

HAU Hebbel am Ufer (HAU2)14 / 10 €

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  • Christina Wheeler

    US/DE

    The Berlin-based, American vocalist, electronic musician, and composer crosses effortlessly from experimental song cycles to jazz and beyond.

    • Christina Wheeler will premiere her complete tone-poem suite titled The Totality of Blackness Trilogy, a multimedia, immersive sound and video performance work devised to engender a space that reframes our experience of Blackness and the accompanying fear often intrinsically enmeshed therein. The trilogy will be presented over three consecutive nights.

    Photo: Courtesy of the artist

    Each tone poem is sung through subtle, elongated vocal techniques with effects processing, allowing the audience to experience the music’s message as both a meditative invocation and a transportive experience, creating a new relationship with Blackness, where fear can be released, and a place of love for the self relative to and included in the larger context of the world and the universe can be encouraged.

    In part one, »Emerge from the Totality of Blackness,« the artist engenders a space that reframes our experience of corporeality and the attendant fear found in the physical transformation from conception through birth, by devising new frameworks to re-experience our gestational history. The audience experiences the work lying down within a surround, multi-speaker sound system, enveloped by video projections of imagined pre-visual imagery, that creates the opportunity to revisit the original interior universe that we've left without the means to negotiate the new, seeming solitariness of life.

    Event Access

    Please consult our Accessibility section for information on volume / lighting, mobility, age restrictions and other access information.

    Conceived, written, produced, and performed by Christina Wheeler
    Video content created by Aaron Kulik
    Video editing by A-li-ce

    Christina Wheeler would like to thank Kamila Metwaly, Bonaventure Ndikung, and SAVVY Contemporary, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, and CTM Festival for their support in developing and presenting a work-in-progress version of Emerge from the Totality of Blackness for their Untraining the Ear series; CTM Festival for their commissioning of the virtual version of Surrender to the Totality of Blackness; Andre Cucu, Julia Gerlach, and the team at the Akademie der Künste for their residency support for developing the project's spatialized sound design; to Henrik von Coler, Fared Schulz, Max Weidauer, and the team at Technische Universität Berlin for the technical support in the realization of this premiere; and the entire CTM Festival and Hebbel am Ufer teams for their tremendous efforts and support in realizing the premiere of The Totality of Blackness Trilogy. Special thanks to Sandra Wheeler for her generous support in the documentation of this project, and for making all of this possible.