Esquizofonía

The autumn stage programme in the Community of Madrid has, together with our Festival, another unmissable event that precedes it in October: the Muestra de Creación Escénica SURGE MADRID. This will be its tenth year. As has been the case since 2020, both events are once again collaborating to give space and greater visibility to emerging works put together by new companies or creators. With the aim of promoting the Salas’ social function in terms of generating opportunities in Madrid, SURGE MADRID worked on 6 pieces at last year’s Festival. Each was performed in front of a live audience. The Salas make a careful selection of the works they would like to host and include in the 41st Festival de Otoño. Their artistic value is considered, and a selection is made from the 43 projects presented. Teatro de los Invisibles’s Contención mecánicaand Silbatriz Pons’s Esquizofonía , about which you can find out more here, were chosen.

Esquizofonía is an audiovisual performance featuring whistling. Marisa Pons, the Silbratriz (the Female Whistler in English), uses her body to whistle and create a scene of ambiguity, dancing in the liminal space between the artificial and the natural and explores the schizophrenic qualities of both worlds. The (human) body that whistles renounces its voice, becoming a being that is both woman and machine. Pons states: “This whistling lives in the abstract. I am trying to understand its behaviour and its dynamics. I am thinking about animals whilst being aware that a whistle doesn’t have a body. My body is mine and I no longer dress up anymore.”

This is the artist’s third piece in which she continues her research to explore whistling’s performance potentials. Esquizofonía brings together Episodio 08 and Cosa negra.The dynamics of this exploration are becoming clearer and better defined. Marisa Pons brings the choreographer and dancer María Cabeza de Vaca and the musician Óscar Villegas into the mix with her third performance along with her collaboration with director and playwright Luis Moreno. They have fused with each other’s creativity to create an audiovisual piece that incorporates other theatre specialisms. The performance starts with a visual: a bare and luminous place designed to evoke open landscapes, an empty and mute environment from where the whistling body, its only inhabitant, develops an energy without time, without past and without future.

The Canadian composer and environmentalist, Raymond Murray Schafer, rebelled against urban life, coining the term "schizophonia" to describe the separation of a sound from its original source through electronic reproduction. He claims schizophonia dates to the Industrial Revolution. It was the moment when humans started to become disconnected from their natural and animalistic essence due to the radical transformations taking place. There was an alteration in the natural qualities. Whistling provides the body with a reason to anchor itself to the natural essence, showing, through sound, a complex duality.

Taking inspiration from the sounds of flamenco and the East, the piece is the art of melodic fusion and sound. If there is one thing these musical cultures have in common, it is the elongation of sound, its stretching in lamentation and moaning. The whistled composition is a melodic continuum articulated in several textures: a cappella whistling, amplification and in polyphony through a loop pedal. Other sounds are added into the mix, both organic and industrial, that will complete what is undoubtedly a genuine sound experience.