An IN SITU Pilot Project
Foreign Tongues from Liquid Loft (Austria) puts the act of speaking at the centre of a choreographic process and reflects the experience of contemporary urban life, its polyphony and multilingualism.
Each city, through its languages, jargons and regional variations, creates its own sounds. Some new languages or dialects might appear and become audible in a city, while others might be temporarily lost or even become extinct.
Liquid Loft investigates the sounds of languages spoken by individuals in a region or a city, focussing on characteristics like tone, rhythm, dynamics or intonation of the speaker. The human body is – as it were – the instrument for these phonetic acts, which are then transferred as a music score into public space.
How does a human being move in public space and how do the linguistic sound environments created by ourselves and others, influence our body language? In a very subtle way, mythology and politics penetrate our daily movements. Language contains all of this, in a very subconscious and intangible form.
We're extremely proud to be one of only three UK partners of the Europe-wide IN SITU Network, bringing this show to Freedom Festival in 2019.
In 2018, Foreign Tongues was presented in Terschelling at Oerol Festival (The Netherlands), in Prishtina at Hapu Festival (Kosovo), in Graz at La Strada Graz (Austria) and in Hasselt at Theater op de Markt (Belgium).
In May 2018, IN SITU members selected six pilot projects to collectively support from inception to touring. Six projects with a social consciousness, that address contemporary issues and are relevant in an international contest. Each project reflects the artistic vision of IN SITU including, scale adaptability, accessibility to large audiences, involvement of local artistic collaborators, leaving a real visual or physical trace.
Foreign Tongues, an IN SITU Pilot project, has received a creation aid by the ACT project, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. The co-producers are Atelier 231 (FR), Festival di Terni (IT), Freedom Festival (UK), La Strada Graz (AT), Lieux publics (FR), Norfolk & Norwich Festival (UK), Østfold kulturutvikling (NO), Oerol Festival (NL), Theater op de Markt (BE), UZ Arts (UK).
