Vleeshal opens its 2023 program with Song Sing Soil by Eglė Budvytytė and Marija Olšauskaitė.

The venue has been split into two spaces, with two separate entrances. In the front room of the Vleeshal is Songs from the Compost: Mutating Bodies, Imploding Stars, a film by Budvytytė with Olšauskaitė and Julija Lukas Steponaitytė, which was exhibited as part of The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 and is shown here for the first time in The Netherlands.

Shot on location in the forests and sand dunes around Nida Art Colony on the Curonian Spit in Lithuania, Songs from the Compost features a cast of teenage dancers and students from a local high-school, in what has been described as a meditation on sylvan-cyborgian symbiosis. Wearing costumes that are partly decomposed after being buried in the ground for several weeks—and with their bodies extended and enhanced through a series of mysterious prosthetics—the performers enact fleshy becomings and un-becomings in ritualized relationships with the landscape.

The backspace hosts a sound installation and functions as a kind of rehearsal space for the development of a new performance work, which will evolve throughout the exhibition. There is a custom-modified trampoline, which visitors are invited to use when there is no performance scheduled. During the performances, the trampoline becomes a stage and an integral part of the choreography—not as a way for the performers to jump into the air, but as a way for them to move while sinking into the ground.

The ground and its composting soils are important motifs for the artists in developing this new work. Gravity has a lot of pull in the choreography; bodies move slowly, through downward horizontality and surrender. The ground is where materials rot and break down while new growth simultaneously takes formation. How to move in the space that exists between form and formlessness? Also: How to move while being moved by each other? Just as the soil is a site of intense and messy relationality, the trampoline is embraced here as a shared plane where everyone is affected by each other’s movements.

Commissions

Song Sing Soil

Eglė Budvytytė, Marija Olšauskaitė

Performance
2023

+12

Concept & directing: Eglė Budvytytė & Marija Olšauskaitė

Lyrics & voices: Eglė Budvytytė

Art direction: Marija Olšauskaitė

Performed & co-created with: MingJou Chen, Tomislav Feller, Marilou Fortuné, Tosca Knauf

Choreographic assistance: Noha Ramadan

Additional sound design: Andreas Tegnander

Styling assistance & custom safety pin t-shirt: Patricija Grabauskaitė

Duration: 26 min

Song Sing Soil explores the permeability between shapelessness and form, between the realms of living and dying, between meaning-making and pulling it apart. The performance – a choreography for three performers – slowly unfolds around a specially conceived song that drifts between different mindsets, tones, voices and frequencies with a soundtrack that fluctuates between fierce instructions directed to the listener, silent moments, tender melodies and intimate musings. The performers’ movements respond to this soundscape, supporting the words with their bodies and gazes.

Song Sing Soil makes a plea for us to slow down, to stay with the in-betweenness, and to expand our capacity for feeling and listening.

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