tongues undone

by Cris Cheek, Sianed Jones and Martin Sercombe

Tongues Undone has grown out of a collaboration between performance artists Cris Cheek and Sianed Jones and video artist Martin Sercombe. It explores a unique territory between live poetry, experimental music, and digital video art. The starting point is the performance work of Cheek and Jones. It explores a hybrid, evolving language, breaking through the boundaries between music, poetry and performance art.

Sercombe has extended this dialogue into the visual realm. Sound is transformed into kinetic abstract gestures, graphic symbols are translated into performed sound and body movements, spoken words mutate into animated text on the video screen. As this happens, the camera dances between the two performers to create an intimate three way exchange.

In the live show, Cheek and Jones perform inside an animated spotlight of projected imagery, which follows them through the performance space. The graffiti and fragmentary texts provoke an extemporised dialogue, translating the imagery into streams of sound and physical gesture. Sercombe's live camerawork of Cheek and Jones is seen on the main screen, giving the audience a mediated view of the live performance. The performers travel up to the main screen where their bodies appear to merge with their virtual counterparts in the single screen work, described below.

The performance ends with a three way improvisation between the performers and video artist. Cheek and Jones exchange vocal statements over mechanistic layers of live triggered sound samples. Their gestures are stretched and spun through the space by a live time lapse camera which responds to and extends each of the sound images.

The Single Screen Work

The central theme of the work is the human voice, and the translation of vocal sound into choreographed movement and gesture. In papier mache mountains Jones appears to build a sound landscape around her in a series of powerful calls and violin statements. These manifest as a complex travelling matte of interwoven graphic marks and fragments of text.

In conversations , Cheek and Jones perform a series of staccato vocal exchanges, whilst exploring the physical spaces defined by the video screen. Cheek then performs with five clones, who each translate graphic representations of scribbled human figures into a barrage of full torso body gestures and vocal sounds.

In sound shapes Cheek and Jones exchange brief vocal statements which they trace with their hands through the white space on the video screen. These sound marks are then digitally transformed into densely layered animated texts.

In dogerrell Cheek performs an extended improvisation around the eponym, as the camera layers highly intimate images of text, lips, tongues, teeth, saliva and sweat.

In You see the sights but you don't see the struggle it's a struggle to see, it's kept out of sight Cheek and Jones improvise around the poetic text, as their faces merge and separate, and identities are exchanged back and forth via kinetic, grainy black and white camerawork.

In deepthroat, the two performers exchange long vocal statements as the camera explores the architecture of the mouth and throat.

The work ends with a cry of passion, in a potent exchange between clarinet, voice and treated bass. Jones' voice transforms her avatar into a surreal amalgam of glass, metal and skin.