Lisa Lapidge and Kim Jin-Young / Momsori
LISA LAPIDGE (UK) AND KIM JIN-YOUNG/MOMSORI (KOREA)
2017 / 2018
This project was a residency exchange, research investigation and creative collaboration between two voice artists and site specific theatre practitioners with interests in experiential performance and neuroscience.
The two artists were brought together by Simon Chatterton. He had seen Lisa performing at a festival in the UK – from the back of a van – and then on his study trip to Korea in 2016, he saw a performance by Momsori. He felt that there could be a resonance between their approaches and suggested the idea to them both. They agreed to share their practice and find out how much they had in common, despite living thousands of miles apart.
Lisa went to Korea in late 2016 and worked there with Jin-young and her company Momsori. She also led a workshop for community participants. Jin-young came to the UK 2018, working with Lisa at 101, where they worked with Oxford Brookes university. This took further their interest in how the voice and brain interact.
Oxford Brookes set up experiments to measure this interaction, for example looking at an exercise to create entrainment between pitch and resonance matching between two people, using polyphonic singing, being in tune and harmony, exploring ideas about being with one another through voice
Lisa and Jin-young were wired up to an ECG, and they looked at their brainwaves. They also used a small device, a gyroscope which is used to detect gait changes in Parkinson’s patients, measuring very small movements. This was placed on their larynxes and they did entrainment exercise to find out how they mirrored each other in physiological as well as auditory terms.
The time at 101 culminated with an open session for about 10 people at which the audience completed questionnaires about their feelings in response to the sound, as part of the Oxford Brookes research.
The goal was to share practice, not to create a performance. They learnt and grew from being with each other. Lis has been back to Korea, and Jin-young back to the UK. It’s developed into a very supportive relationship, both as friends and artists and they have stayed in touch despite all the difficulties of covid.
Lisa states that the partnership has influenced and changed her approach to her voice work. Usually her work is quite structured, for example using a text as a framework. Jin-young would start from the abstract, making a sound and see how it resonates. Lisa opened up more to improvisation and putting meaning before text. They have taken influences from each other into their work going forwards.
Their collaboration has been presented at a conference, Sounding Each Other Out, at the Royal Central School Speech & Drama, for the International Network of Voice symposium. In this, Lisa linked their work to the report commissioned by the Jo Cox foundation about loneliness, about working across borders. She is also drawing on this process in work with her students at the University of Northampton
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