Hamel: Translations, Migrations and Rituals of Care

YOUYOU GROUP

HAMEL. DEEP TIME RIVER

A performance by the YouYou Group, part of De Singel’s Festival CARTA

Textual commission by YouYou Group and De Singel

The YouYou Group started as a collective attempt at understanding the ways in which a particular use of the voice can create an immediate sense of community and connectedness. Through the use of various vocal techniques related to ululation, youyou,  the remarkable ability of the voice can do the unexpected (signal, express, harmonise, create the space but also break it,,...etc). Owing to that, their practice explores the possibilities of how the voice itself can make us understand the way we relate to sound in ways we didn’t imagine possible. We can think of the practice of the group as collective ways of imagining sound and community. The work of the group has so far been presented in various constellations, spatially, but also physically.  With each performance something about the process of creation in itself develops a language of its own and a set of practices that builds on the idea of sharing and engaging together as a group and composing ways to invite the audience into their process. 

In this production  the group stages their first piece for a theatre, with its specific architecture and space, and so the group expands their own understanding of what does space do to the body, to the performing body, to the singing body, and to the bodies of the audience that are listening and engaging in this practice. 

Youyou, ululation itself, a spontaneous, organic expression in many parts of the world, and specifically in the Middle East and parts of Africa, is something inherently tied to community. One can think of it as a signalling system, the same way that yodelling has been and continues to be in certain parts of central Europe. Youyou immediately, by its very nature, breaks space and transfers a message. A message of joy (someone’s success), of celebration (someone’s wedding), of grief (someone’s death), of scandalous censure (someone arguing), and many other experiences that are translated and transmitted so effectively and instantaneously. We can think of youyou as calling on our attention, our affective and emotional selves, a use of the voice that changes the space around us and makes certain things possible. An incantation perhaps.

And while in places where it is practised, one can hear ululation echoing through the space on special occasions (sometimes ringing throughout the night, for hours), it can be an unsettling experience for those who are not used to it. The forceful projection and vibration of the upper register of the voice, is still within the sound frequency range we can hear (the soprano range, somewhere between 2000 - 5000 Hz), but some may still find it “extreme”.

For this production, the YouYou Group chose a story, The Pied Piper of Hammelin (later collected by the Brothers Grimm among many others) as a premise to stage their piece. Stories, like sounds and music, have a strange way of making connections where plausibly there are none. Historically stories travel, orally, through repetition and reiteration, through time and space.  With each displacement encountering new terrains, new sounds, and undergoing inflections and translations that thicken its contours and make it linger a little bit more in our imagination. 

Through the many lives that stories have, and that stories cross, they also can be and have been weaponized and used to dismiss, malign, reinforce experiences and truths at the expense of others. Stories have been used since the late 18th C in Europe to solidify nationalist claims, to standardise languages and even reveal truths about the social structure of Europe throughout modernity and industrialization.

One particular collection of stories, the Grimm Brothers, left an indelible mark on the imagination of many of its readers, once again pointing to historical trajectories that carry extraordinary political, social, economic and even medical truths. The Grimm stories even make an appearance in the Arabic language as they were translated and retold in Modern Standard Arabic (in a famed series starting the mid-1940s), acquiring a different tone, cast and mixed with existing stories, giving a strange poetic tone, and proving how stories can  reappear in different guises and different sounds.

The choice of the mysterious pied piper points to the several themes underlying the tale. The mysterious figure, an outsider, that seduces and charms, the rat infestation that threatens the town (a strong reference to the plague or disease pandemic), the way outsiders are treated (first with promise and then with treachery and xenophobia), the anxiety about children and what they are exposed to, and lastly the appearance and disappearance of whole groups of people, lost to the forest, the river or the hills (the difficulty of travelling during mediaeval Europe and the struggle to control nature). This could not be a more apt choice, politically, considering what is happening in Europe right now. As evidenced by the frantic rise of anti-immigration parties and platforms, springing up all the way from Sweden to Italy and from Finland all the way to France. The drowning of children in the river, in the piper’s tale, could almost parallel the drowning of the children of immigrants and refugees in the Mediterranean sea, in the here and now. This time there is no music to seduce, and no story to tell.

For most of the 300,000 years that humans (homo sapiens) roamed the planet, they migrated and moved across large swathes of land, land that they will soon completely colonise (everywhere except Antarctica). They most probably did not form any kind of permanent settlement until many thousands of years later, probably 12,000 years ago (with the development of farming). A blink of an eye, compared to the cosmic scale of time. And yet somehow even though humans constantly moved, migrated across the earth’s landmass, European politicians now want us to believe that they can stop that. Or that such migrations are not an essential part of what being human was and is. The same way that stories migrate and move, and sound ‘leaks’ into spaces where it is not expected, the YouYou Group launches a new exploration of sound and the stories it brings and the stories it can create anew.

The practitioners of the group each brings personal histories and practices, that are inspired by the traces of the piper story, and its motifs: a community, a path, a river, the forest, the hills and enchanting/overpowering sound. The performance moves beyond the story, what we experience is yet another translation of the story. It is channelled through the group’s practice, the way the voice evokes memories, sensation, sense-memory that points out to traces and pathways of what was or imagined to be. Here the flow of sound, of experiences, mirrors and echoes the flow of the river.Once again transforming space, creating unusual resonance, and morphing the same way water does. Unlike the story, the group has been using the voice and the possibilities of sound to create community, and to engender rituals of healing. Youyou as incantation, an otherworldly sonic experience. Grounding performance in its ritual potential and building on rituals that each group member has been involved in through their own individual history. This piece aspires to create possibilities for audiences to recognize the flow that stories and sound make, in a mutual act of recognition and healing. The care initiated in the process of bringing those different echoes and traces to the audience, of finding new routes of ‘transmission’ and translation, of mapping routes of how imagination and sound migrate, is at the very heart of this performance. 

As the group embraces the possibilities of togetherness and community, the audience is invited to do just the same. And once again witness the joy, the celebration, the grief and healing our voice and stories can bring.