Workshop-Presentation With Performance-Demonstration by Opens
Sound is an essential element of the shamanisms practiced in indigenous cultures around the world, and continues to be an indispensable tool for neo-shamanic practitioners today. For the shaman, sonic techniques and technologies can open a multitude of dimensions within the self and the other, helping practitioners access altered states of consciousness, facilitate methods of healing and divination, and enable translocal and interspecies forms of communication.
In this workshop-presentation, Arunditha Emmanuel discussed the role of sound in shamanism and its possible intersections with contemporary music-making and creative processes. The evening concluded with an intuitive sound performance-demonstration by Arunditha and collaborating artist-musician Anise.
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Deborah Arunditha Emmanuel is a performance artist and writer working between poetry, sound, movement, and the dramatic arts. She has performed at many events and festivals locally and worldwide, winning poetry slams in Singapore, New Zealand, Germany and Australia. She has been resident writer/artist at the Watermill Center in New York, Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, and The Marpha Foundation in Mustang. She makes neo-shamanic tribal funk music with Mantravine and co-organises Opens, a para-academic forum based in Singapore.
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Anise (Suhui Hee) is a multidisciplinary artist and electronic musician working with sound, performance and experimental scoring. Her research interests delve into inhumanisms and the body as ecosphere.
Opens is a para-academic forum based in Singapore. Against the authoritarian-technocapitalist enclosure of the physical and discursive spaces of our island-city-state, they experiment with modes of discourse-making, space-making, and conceptual research & development intended to catalyse speculative incursions into other possible futures. Opens consists of an informal network of co-conspirators. The administrative and organising labour is currently performed by founding co-organisers Helios Singh Bajwa and Arunditha Emmanuel.