Surrender to the Totality of Blackness

29th Jan 2023 29th 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 as well as 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.

    Inspired originally by the Black Lives Matter movement, part two of the suite, »Surrender to the Totality of Blackness,« begins at a languid tempo and slows down further to release all sense of rhythm, transforming into pure ambient sound. Lyrics delve deep to examine issues of control, release, and surrender to the larger elements of the world and the universe. The instrumentation for this composition is voice, digital sampler, Array mbira, QChord, autoharp, virtual synthesisers, and electronics. Immersive, ambisonic sound design diffuses through a multi-speaker array format, with sound sources that reference the earth, sea, sky, and universe.

    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 by Aaron Kulik

    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.