Press Reviews       LAETITIA SONAMI Press Reviews of the interactive Performance on April 16, 2005     back    She appears to be conducting an imaginary orchestra, or rather drawing the sounds with her own hands directly out of hidden corners of the space. Not without reason, Laetitia Sonami has been compared to a priestess who is in contact with the invisible. The sound events that suddenly appear in the room, controlled by her glittering silver digital gloves, come from every imaginable area, from electronic relays to everyday noises from our surroundings, everything freely following John Cage’s dictum that everything that is heard is music, even silence. The first part of the title for Sonami’s program on Saturday at the Forum Neues Musiktheater in the Römerkastell in Cannstatt, The Appearance of Silence / The Invention of Perspective, may allude to this, while the second refers to the construction of space. By connecting directly with the space through her physical movements, Sonami creates an instrument that permits delicate transitions in areas that written notes on flat paper could not reach. Stuttgarter Zeitung Nowhere else in Stuttgart can innovations in the area of performance be experienced as immediately and directly as in the Römerkastell in Cannstatt. (…) There Laetitia Sonami stands like a master of ceremonies, in a ritual action with extended arms on the stage, directing invisible and imaginary sound sources with sometimes expansive, sometimes short and angular directions, with the results conveyed to the audience through a surround-sound system. The speakers squawk, chirp, burble, roar, and rustle, and sometimes rhythmic and tonal patterns are suggested. Like a musical ultrasound device, the visual dissection of these sound worlds can be seen on a video screen as Sonami intensifies the dramaturgy of the whole by reciting dramatically. (…) With reasonable certainty one can predict that computer-controlled processes for turning movement into sound are about to experience a considerable renaissance. Stuttgarter Nachrichten The conversation itself—cave music with Op-Art components of glowing and fading lightbulbs—transforms timbres into rhythmic aggregate states, and causes shredding noises to awake the human body like an alarm clock: it pulses, breathes, lives. In Laetitia Sonami’s performance the sounding body moves as well: the artist herself, modeling the sound events in an electronic eurhythmy, gesturing in space, drawing from the earth on bent knees. All this has its own choreographic expressivity—and its own sentimentality: beyond technology stands the human being. Cannstatter Zeitung
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