Participation, transformation, experimentation. Lore Lixenberg
The mezzo-soprano, Lore Lixenberg, talks to us about art, her art, politics, her politics and the heady, challenging and engaging mix of the two.
Who are you?
Oh...I am Lore! I am a post-cyborg atomic mezzo-soprano. I also make things out of sound and operatic artefacts.
How do you do what you do?
How to sum that up?? Well, concurrent with my interpretive and improvisational voice-art practice, I have evolved a compositional practice based purely on voice, that has three major features. Firstly, treatment of the voice, exploring extended vocal techniques and hyper-extensions of the voice (BIRD - pieces working with birdsong from the inside out, applying the extended body practice to the voice). Secondly, drawing on socially engaged practices (PRÊT À CHANTER, The Voice Party) and thirdly, exploring digital technologies and apps for their operatic dramatic potential regarding the language of code as libretto, (SINGLR and VOXCOIN).
I also incorporate comedy into my creative, experiments, its timing, characters and possibilities for subversion. I'm interested in the possibilities of participatory practices for their creative potential and possible transformative effects. I would describe my process as improvisational, participatory, experimental and chaotic.
Why do you do what you do?
Why? I do it out of an endless fascination for the form of opera that never leaves my side, no matter how impossible things seem. I do it because, in a space time continuum of trillions of light years cubed where in the face of eternity all life is ultimately pointless, I have the privilege of existence for the briefest of moments measured in the human life span, and for some strange reason I will probably never understand, I breathe in and out and am born in the time of trees to witness things like sunshine, motorways and pasta.
Where/how are you in the present situation?
December 2020 , I was breaking for the border on a Ryanair flight to Bratislava. My final destination was Vienna, but because the new variant of coronavirus had been found in England, understandably the Austrian border was slammed shut to arrivals from ‘Plague Island’ (aka - the UK). For some reason, Slovakia was allowing flights from the ‘Septic Isle’ and I grabbed this opportunity. I knew that after midnight on the 31st, suddenly I would find myself the citizen of a 3rd country, and entry into the EU at all, would become tricky. So armed with my passports and a negative corona test, I took my chances.
The background to this is obviously the trauma of Brexit and the fact that the UK sociopathic liar for a prime minister at the helm, who is in fact completely empty - he believes in – well... nothing really and just follows the stinking winds of populism. He was advised by an evil snake with borderline personality disorder, Dominic Cummings, with a host of characters such as Nigel Farage and Priti Patel, fanning the maligned flames of populist racism. These people consider themselves to be above the law and behave with impunity.
The UK also has an uneducated, culturally numb population frozen in aspic, traumatised by years of austerity, desperate people whose underfunded self-image is still based on outmoded WW2 tropes and who still think they somehow have an empire and that they are better than other peoples. A cap-doffing vulgar population who are taught the Pavlovian response to pee themselves with excitement and drop to their knees at at the sight of royalty (or anyone they consider to be their financial superior) and through ignorance, and media lies, vote against their own self interests. They are a population who never went through a period of self-examination after the horrors of empire, colonialisation, partition, slavery and theft. Indeed, they are now imposing partition upon themselves with the break-up of the UK. Our poor country is not the only one in this position, but is a surprising addition to a litany of failed states internationally.
All the challenges that are currently being thrown at us - pandemic, climate crisis, world inequalities, poverty, homelessness - are made far worse by these British leaders. They feed the population enough ‘news’ to excite them, but not enough to educate. They do so via various channels: Rupert Murdoch and his SKY ’News’ plus Fox News channel, also the ubiquitous social media, in particular Twitter, all the while maligning the BBC public funded broadcasting, who at least try to disseminate thoughtful content. For instance, we are asked to believe as a population, that a few hundred bedraggled refugees that make it across the English Channel in fragile rubber dinghies, somehow constitute a national emergency. This fake news and skewed vision is designed to shock, destabilise, and to take the populations’ minds off the real threats of climate change, pandemic and in my stupid country of birth…Brexit.
The population is lied to daily through these social media channels. The language used is incendiary and manipulative. This ‘fake news’ Conservative party encourages the population to think of ‘me’ and not ‘we’, the ultimate expression of this being the Brexit vote that was also built on fake news and lies (£360 million/week to be spent on the NHS if the UK leaves the EU, to name one famous piece of fake news) with one U-turn after another. In addition to the actual tweets and posts from the government we have a whole host of bots and trolls of various nationalities, who amplify this fake news, which gives the impression of solidifying it via repetition.
The psychology of the bot is fascinating. There are bot farms in various locations in the world, machines dedicated to the nefarious task of causing mischief, that are programmed to get clicks and likes, and to provoke reaction. I noticed on social media, people unwittingly getting into terrible arguments with bots, that they could never win. It is due, in part, to these bots and amplifiers of right-wing stories that brexit was won.
This piece is an attempt to harness the angry energy of the bot and transform it. Because of the confusion of altered realities, being gas-lighted by our own government who try to tell you that things you see in front of your face are not there, in 2017, I declared that everything I do in my life is to be considered an extended-vocal because, in the 2016 UK referendum, words and syntax were once again twisted into lies and were used to appeal to and encourage the worst, most base aspects of human nature, persuading the English (and American people, in the case of Trump) to vote against their own interests.
It wasn’t only the shock and disgust at Brexit that galvanised my departure, but also, crucially, I had a hot date with radio ORF to work in their hörspiel studio in Vienna and I was not going to let anyone or anything stop me. It's funny, leaving wasn't so much a decision as an instinct for survival, I don't think I could have coped with being on British soil at 11pm 31/12/20. I did not regret making this move. After a two week quarantine period and another test, I had my first sessions in these studios.
The project I was working on was ’TheVoicePartyOperaBotFarm - MyFuryIsMyMuse’, This is a hybrid piece created originally as a twitterbot that was programmed to troll Boris Johnson’s twitterfeed (and will be trained on another political sociopath once he is booted out) mocking, joking, advising, commenting, insulting, flirting and fleeing from nightmares about him. This piece came out of my project ‘The Voice Party’ that is both an opera and a political party, standing in opposition to Boris Johnson at the UK elections in 2019. The Voice Party stands for everything that the mainstream parties do not and if elected would restructure the entire political system around the beautiful, truthful, harmonious and egalitarian laws of pure sound. Music would no longer stand cringing and impoverished in the background of society, gratefully receiving the pathetic crumbs of support currently on offer, prostituting itself in meaningless, castrated government sponsored arts projects, constantly having to justify itself to a grey, ignorant and culturally illiterate elite, whose interest in 'the arts' doesn't extend beyond specially commissioned lame and useless pie charts. It would be gloriously and proudly at the centre of society where its true place should be.
‘The Voice Party’ is an obsession and an enormous project that may never be completed in my lifetime! Probably I die with it unfinished. Maybe it takes on a life of its own. I will consider it a success when I am voted out as its leader and someone young and charismatic replaces me.
To say that working in the ORF studios was a revelation would be an understatement. The possibilities I found there were mind-blowing and had a big effect on the work I was doing, not only because of the amazing technical possibilities in that studio, but also because of the expertise of the engineers I was working with. I learnt so much, I basically did not want to leave, and it has left me with an appetite to explore this medium much further.
The composed bots are created by combining acerbic, desperate vocals that loop and build-up as the stress of being English floods the brain with cortisol (what fresh hell will the government unleash on us today?), sometimes with gloopy nostalgic songs as found sound objects (eg. ‘White Christmas’, and ‘Lily the Pink’) being used to remind the population of a past and of Christmas’ past that they never actually had. Included are voices of politicians with their own particular voice formants and tics, some programmed by AI, most notably Boris Johnson.
I have always been fascinated by the artistic possibilities and politics of participatory practices. Maybe because I have never ever felt I belong to any particular community, I am fascinated by how they function and maybe, as a complete outsider, I have a bird’s eye view of them. In the time of Corona, it has been really difficult to organise community activity unless on zoom, but maybe it has given a space to reflect on them and their possibilities.
Because access to the human community in lockdown has been limited, I found myself seeking the communities of birds with their effortless daily participatory opera - the dawn chorus. I was lucky to perform BIRD at Bill Bank- Jones Tête a Tête Opera Festival 2020. This was the first company to explore the possibilities of analog performances in a pandemic, opening with Heloise Werner 'Across the Sea' at the Cockpit theatre. It was a great success in that it was a beautiful jewel of a festival, groundbreaking and I would say that the risk assessments and front of house precautions were equally as choreographed and operatic as anything happening on the stage.
From that time I was concentrating very much on birdsong and bird communities and finally was able to finish a book 'Birdsong Studies' that are vocal exercises based on birdsong. There are 80 of them based on different songbirds. I have transcribed examples of birdsong and also filmed the birds, the idea being that the student/performer studies the bird video for the choreography of the piece to really transform themselves physically and vocally into a bird.
My interest in singing birdsong is born out of a desire to escape from being human because I watch birds in awe. I see them not only producing their carefully honed song, but completely and unselfconsciously embodying it. Obviously the birdsongs can be transposed for all voices and, as is true to birdsong, they include introductions to extended vocals.
It's really fascinating to me that there is still so much fear around contemporary singing and especially extended vocals among voice students, and yet I don't know any singer in the contemporary singing world who has ever run into serious vocal problems. The same cannot be said of those who bash their voices to death on a diet of only Verdi. Georgia Barnes and some of her compatriots at Trinity Laban had a go at 'Robin' from the studies during the lockdown.
I would love to get the 'Bird Studies' published by a publisher with a proper distribution. Failing that, I will publish myself as I usually do. As the outsiders’ outsider I often find myself in this position and always think of something. Interestingly and ironically, as an outsider (and 100% funding free) many of my publications have found their way into institutions such as the Kandinsky Library at the Pompidou Centre and various other places.
In other activities, I had the amazing good luck to do the first lockdown in 2020 with my partner Frederic Acquaviva, whose great piece ANTIPODES was written for the combined voices of Dorothy Ianonne, Joel Hubaut and me. It went on to win the SWR Karl Szuka Prize in Germany and we were supposed to go to Donaueschingen 2020 for the festival. Hopefully this will happen next year. He has written now five substantial pieces for my voice and is a composer who really seems to understand my instrument. Performing his music is super fun.
What can we do?
As musicians, I would love that out of this time comes a true sense of community, where musical tribes are dissolved, where everyone has access to support, music, lessons and performance spaces when they open again, whoever they are, whatever community they come from. I am not holding my breath.
