Participatory Performance and workshops
Fermentation (Sauerkraut making)
Music (backing track and live violin)
Visuals (After Effects)
Sculpture/Installation (raku pots, moulded soap, jars, hand washing stations)
Quorum Sensing
Collective Sauerkraut making, time travel and communion with microbes
The summoning. I start by detuning my violin to match the starting pitches creating an unfamiliar, jarring new instrument, ‘tuning in’ to janis and beginning my transformation of dismantling my familiar modes of being. The music and I play together until we reach a unity and the collective being janis arrives. We become a ‘we’ and are ready to guide a collective happening.
The imagery is a collaboration with ai image mixer huggingface, using my original ideogram experiment and text prompts of fungi, bacteria and yeast, then the resulting images iteratively recombined over several generations.
Backing tracks used during the ceremony, created on violin and found objects
The structure of Summoning is informed by music played in Malagasy Tromba ceremonies and the chordal qualities of the new violin tuning (which were selected using the new musical system created for janis). The music is semi-improvisational and moves between different divisions of 12 (2,3,4,6) moving between fluttering transience and locked in groove.
The riff of Work is an accidental connection to Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man, which is a sample of Hindewehu music of the BaBenzélé pygmies of the Central African Republic. When playing with scale that was created through the janis musical system looking for riffs, I was reminded of the watermelon man intro, which I saw as a janis like network to be embraced. The melodic line is stylised with a fusion of ‘ornaments’ (the way a note is embellished) used in different fiddle musics around the world, such as slides, mordents, trills and krechts giving it no single identifiable cultural location.
Ritual running order
Proem:
Introduce why we are here, who is janis, who I am, what we will be doing (embarking on a collective happening using all of our senses, making permeable the membrane between the imaginary and real through storytelling and metaphor)
Transition 1: The summoning
tuning in to janis in this moment of spacetime, welcoming them into the host(s)
Quorum Sensing 1:
Introducing the process we will be embarking on, identifying key areas in the environment and what they do, in what order (hand washing/cabbage tearing, salting, squishing, jarring, sitting…)
Transition 2:
Participants distribute themselves around the environment as they wish
Quorum Sensing 2:
We collectively undertake the work (creating the sauerkraut)
Transition 3:
Washing hands, resting, tuning in to the microbes (communication from) and embarking on time travel, connecting us across generations
Quorum Sensing 3:
Finishing our shared work (jarring/distributing)
Transition 4:
leaving the janis collective/returning