HUMAN SIGNS
GLOBAL PARTICIPATORY DANCE AND VOICE PROJECT
ONLINE, 2020
YOUTUBE PREMIERE - 12 MAY 2020 - 7.30 CET on youtube.com/yuvalavital
"It’s always a good time to hold high a sign: Everyone has a voice and a body — to touch on the shared things of being human and enliven the frequencies of everyday life. We all need human signs, not just these days, but every day."
(David Moss, Berlin, April 2020)
"With half of humanity locked down, adapting in silence, distance and seclusion to support the civil effort, we sound and move with fear, prayer, longings, emptiness, compassion, desire, vulnerability, rage and grief: trembling and vibrating as a body of Human Signs."
(Yuval Avital, April 2020)
HUMAN SIGNS - TEASER
HUMAN SIGNS - PRELUDE - YUVAL SONG
“Human Signs” is a multimedia work conceived and directed by Yuval Avital. It is realised together with a multidisciplinary creative team and invites artistic collaboration through the connectivity of the web. The work brings the voice as a carrier of millennial traditions through classical, contemporary and experimental singers together with dancers from the world of ballet, contemporary dance and other body languages and gesture formations.
The entire work is based on a dialogue of Avital’s Cantus Firums, an audio-visual self-filmed mantra or wordless individual prayer. Cantus Firmus defines the duration of the work, its aesthetic context and emotional subtext, vulnerability and truthfulness. The additional performers, invited from around the globe, will be self-filmed and recorded indoors, while they are currently facing the COVID-19 situation, bringing their own inner prayers and reactions to today’s unique reality, united through a series of audiovisual works presented online in different formats and contexts.
“Human Signs” arises both from the human need for that meaningful contact which is denied by the imposed isolation,and a new way of creating and sharing art. Isolation and connection are used as language and platform, conveying them in a participatory work of art in where each participant can contribute from their home, using the most essential elements of human expression - Voice and Gesture.
FROM MILAN TO THE WORLD
“Human Signs” is born in Milan - one of the most COVID-19 affected areas in the world - where are based Yuval Avital and the project Dance Coordinator Stefania Ballone (Senior Dancer and choreographer of La Scala Ballet). From Milan, the project aims to spread itself as a worldwide artisitc act based on human connection, truthfulness and mutual understanding, rediscovered in this particular time of forced closeness and reclusion.
"Avital’s fabricated aesthetic ‘virus’ (the ‘cantus firmus’) provides the genetic code for Human Signs, proliferating and becoming plastic through other artists’ responses in an exponential spread. Between the transcendental and the ancestral, these combined gestures of bodies and voices are rooted in a pure, visceral, intimate expression of individual and collective humanity - as a symbol, a message and a testimony."
TEAM
DANCE CURATOR STEFANIA BALLONE
SOFTWARE PROGRAMMING NICCOLO’ GRANIERI
SOUND EDITING TYCHONAS MICHAILIDIS
VIDEO EDITING MONKEYS VIDEOLAB
LIVE BROADCAST EDITOR FRANCO COVI
COORDINATOR VALENTINA BUZZI