Liquid destinies: Trance Reading

A Trance Reading proposes a ritualistic encounter with text. Fascinated by how a discourse can be experienced in a visceral instead of rational manner, I'm examining how language can touch and move bodies, cause a shift of perception and even invite altered states of consciousness, with words as the psychedelic substance. There are many words from different origins to describe the same technique: invocation, mantra, spell, somatic score. I’m interested how words can evoke a change in the singular and the collective (as a group of audience) perception.

Text is a vibration, as Clarice Lispector in ‘Agua Viva’ puts it, a divinatory instrument to invoke the unthinkable, unspeakable, unknown, the divine, the muse.

In Liquid Destinies I’m exploring themes such as metamorphosis, relationships between human and nonhuman, and addressing bodies in their various (trans-)formations. In a collective hypnosis I’m guiding the listeners into alien and animal anatomical sensations. I’m mingling texts from science fiction, anthropology, poetry and mystics with voices, live sound, a loop pedal and effects to create a somatic score that is experienced as a meditative listening journey. The audience is invited to lay down and listen and enter into a dream-state where they experience visions and sensations. The séance takes 45 Minutes.

Trance-Reading was presented during Atlas/Impulstanz, August 2019, during Night Shift in Vooruit/Gent, September 2019 and Philosophy Unbound in Studio Thor/Brussels, November 2019.

Some neurophysiologists have hypothesized that the vocal vibration associated with human use of language caused a kind of cleansing of the cerebrospinal fluid.Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods

Night Shift / Vooruit, Gent, September 2019. Photography: Leontien Allemeersch