Voices Seedlings Are Growing - Johanne Mortgat Shan

I’m thinking about the power of listening and tuning to one’s own voice. Searching for a right tone, for what sounds in tune, good to you. And the liberating power coming out from it.

This year 2022, I worked on a performance called “Swiflty yours”. This performance is a tale about a kind of birds I love : swifts. At the same time, the story is softly about fluidity in gender and relationships with different languages (french, chinese, bird calls).

At first it wasn’t an easy thing to find the appropriate tone for the tale. A place where I feel like something is at work. When something is cooking for real, some discomfort coming from change starts. The range of discomfort for the creation of this piece ran from feeling fearful, stressed, or insecure ; from trying to just deal with it and accept these feelings as part of the process, to moments of overcoming, and moments of joy, or to a “growing feeling”. It wasn’t doing well in every way, but at least I could work from there, a tone, a tune to be continuously sharpened.

Still from the video The monkey’s speech and the flowery dog, 2020

It feels like sharp notes make you grow larger. Growling as a bear’s belly, and birdsongs of a refined power. I learn to work with my voice. I try to feel the resonance of my voice inside me and with the surrounding space hosting it. For now I love short melodic phrases, with sometimes a few words. I appreciate how it changes in different places, with different people. I love to sing alone but it’s also an intriguing feeling to address it, to give it to other presences, listening. It’s a very quiet and calm tension. Maybe sooner or later I’ll be ready for the voice to exist with more noise, various sounds and music, who knows ? I wish to continue to explore, let out, express my voice. Grasping sometimes tiny changes, softly, with fluidity.

This is a poem from the performance, two or three years ago I would have called it a” living-poem”, so as music and songs are to me. I’ll translate it from French :

Je suis un animal mauve et jaune

Mouvant et jeune

Je bouge en suivant des formes d’oiseaux

J’ai rêvé de ce jour, vivre mon torse en tant que torse

« Elle » me va comme une veste, comme la pluie sur mon dos

Si j’étais un « il » je serais le « il » dans « il y a »

J’attends sous le manteau du ciel

Dans les courants chauds, je plante un décor

Je l’arrose et écoute grandir les sons qui s’agitent

Sous les peaux de ciel

Dans les couches d’atmosphère

Pliées dans un même oignon

I’m thinking about the power of listening and tuning to one’s own voice. Searching for a right tone, for what sounds in tune, good to you. And the liberating power coming out from it.

“ I am an animal coloured in hues of yellow and mauve

Young and moving

Birds shapes and I change accordingly

I’ve dreamt of this day, expressing my chest as a human chest

“She” covers me like a coat made of rain

If I were to be a “he”, that would be the “h-e” in “t-H-E-re is”

I wait under a sky of fur

In warm currents, I spread water, seeds

I wait for the vivid sounds to grow

Under the skies’skins,

In between the atmosphere’s layers,

Folded, we are in a same onion.”

Johanne Mortgat Shan is a 23-year-old human being, French and Taiwanese, living in Brussels, Belgium, working as an artist (performance, drawing, music, writing, textile, video).

@johanne.aeiouy / johanne.hotglue.me

youtube : Johanne MS https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChgBXGy7JpAlaYdxdBzi99w

soundcloud : https://soundcloud.com/user-239813237 --> i’m preparing some music these days

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