How could it be possible to do research on sound that leaves traditional logocentric approaches behind – and indeed proceed by thinking and researching sonically and not verbally, visually, diagrammatically? How could one imagine of thinking sonically?
Elia Moretti analysed how an experimental music theatre project opened up new spaces for dialogue and perspectives to perceive a multicultural society. The methodology encompassed an ecological approach, that emphasized the structure of the environment itself and regarded perception as the pick-up of that already structured information according three factors: the relationship between perception and action; adaptation; and perceptual learning. What is the role of sound in perceiving and enacting the changes in contemporary society? The sound of environments reveals territorial transformations that produce ideology and ecosystems which we belong.
The project Symposium Musicum happened in the community festival of contemporary theatre and art UM UM (Slovakia, August 2019), which focused on the relationship of Romani and Slovak societies. The lecture preluded a discovery of a material access to sound that went beyond the concept of representation. An ecological perception of sound allowed the possibility of re-elaborate the present and to challenge self-reproductive relations, as the modernist paradigm which perceived rural territories as simulacra of the past.
Elia Moretti (*1986 in Milano, Italy) is a performer, composer, percussion player and researcher. His research focuses on contemporary and experimental forms of music theatre in the context of Central Europe at the Faculty of Arts in Prague. He is specifically interested in the way sound alters the experience of the performance and he is concerned with the ways in which artistic practices participate in the context (social grounds) they emerge from or respond to.
He has been member of the community theatre Divadlo Continuo, based at the cultural center Švestkový Dvůr (South Bohemia, CZ). He has been involved in pedagogical projects at Accademia Teatro Dimitri (Verscio, CH), Civica Scuola di Teatro Paolo Grassi (Milano, IT), DAMU (Praha, CZ), Rose Bruford College (London, UK), and Accademia Dell’Arte (Arezzo, IT). He regularly plays at national and international festivals.
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