Daydreams blur the borders of reality, change our surrounding world into a kind of wonderland. Recently I went to visit my own festival, a festival that never will be. Famous and not so famous architects talked about the drone of big city’s or how the city sounds bounce back from the hills of Rio de Janeiro and thus create this wild jumpy rhythm. Shanty towns are so chaotically laid out that spiraling melodies seem a very natural musical reproduction of this structure. We would hear in sound and word how big buildings not only produce but also direct and transform the traffic noises. A modern day city dweller would feel lost in a silent town. City noises create their own dynamics, and contribute to development of new ways of thinking.
Also scientists would be there to tell us that communication between plants is based on sound. We would hear those sonic impulses from the micro world, and learn that also we, speaking our languages, use the bare sound of it to communicate, that it doesn’t come down to words alone.
Ach, long distance communication between whales, navigation systems from the birds, the love call of snails, chaos theory and the buzzes of domestic flies, cosmic winds, tectonian moves, vulcanoes, tornadoes and crickets on a hot summer day, suddenly every visitor and participant alike would find pleasure in anecdotes about things they had heard and could not describe in words.
In comes the artist. Each one of them would be commissioned to use the scientific and architectural and filologic and geo-specific sounds and compile a story of it, a work of art that would cause for each listener to daydream himself to a different place.
There would also be a blindfolded sound walk in this festival that will never be. Not the one as we know it, o no. Participants would be brought to different places in a stretch limousine with blinded windows. Not able to see where they are going, together in a moving capsule they would hear strange abstract sounds. As soon as the car stopped, they would be blindfolded. They entered buildings with peculiar smells, sizzlings and tapperings, mumbles, squeeks and bits of conversation. Back to the car, and of to some place in town, a bit aside of the traffic saturated part of it, another walk. Then to an abandoned site, with distant almost undetectable whispers of all kinds. At the end of this sound walk each participant should talk about the things they had imagined.
O yes, it is all possible in a day dreamed world. I guess it is this kind of imagination that fuels not only my own performances. It also determines who I choose to play at my ongoing attempt to set up a festival: