weaving Voices 01.04.2025 issuu - Flipbook - Page 76
arriving in Szalatnak. The common thread of the interviews was
the remembering of personal and historical narratives connected
to the village Szalatnak. This also resulted in metaphors of destiny
threads where various life-stories based on different social, ethnical
or economic backgrounds find connection and are woven into
one textile or carpet. This woven carpet then becomes a physical
representation of the community who belong to the place. The
final textile, in this way, results in a collective pattern of the local
microsociety, and offers a different perspective towards the actual
conflicts, tragedies and personal struggles. The extract of the
documentary which summarises the interviews, the weaving and the
plant dyeing workshops, and the walking performance, is available
on this link.112
Sounding carpet
Attempting to produce a methodological approach, which addresses
the question of how acts of weaving and singing eventually
complement each other in an adult educational toolkit, has been a
main focus of my research. The aim of the research is to find potential
connections between daily or extra-daily 113 vocal/oral expressions
and weaving, which could result in a symbiotic relationship in four
main ways:
1. There is a metaphorical link between weaving and singing in
a group. The way yarns are used to create texture could be
considered similar to how collective sounds are created by the
connecting of individual voices. This analogy can be liberating
regarding our relationship to singing, because in allowing us to
think about group singing in a variety of compositions, it can
encourage us to let go of our worries and overcome our shyness
and preconceptions about singing.
2. Weaving and community singing or storytelling can coexist as
parallel activities in which manual work is also liberating and
community members can express themselves orally in a more
spontaneous way while they are working with their hands. This can
112 Hangfonalak a közösség szövetében [Weaving Voices as Threads of Community] (2024) Available at: https://
www.sinumtheatre.eu/erasmus-2/ [Accessed 20 September 2024].
113 Extra-daily in the sense of Theatre Anthropology used by Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese:
Barba, E. and Savarese, N. (2006) A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer. New
York: Routledge.
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allow people to be more open when they share their emotions
and stories (often humorous) in a narrative or singing form.
Keeping people’s hands occupied reduces the sense of stress,
which might be caused when engaged in direct self-expression.
It also facilitates personal openness within the community, while
the parallel ‘useful action,’ the work being done, gives a sense
of ‘community of fate’ the sweet bitter joyful feeling when hard
workers share the same struggle which then has a concrete result.
3. Another possibility is to interpret the pattern of the woven textile
as a musical score, or a ‘partitura’ (a written piece of music
showing all the parts for instruments and voices), in this case, the
community decodes the pattern of a textile as if it were a system
of musical notes or vocal indications. The conductor’s task is to
guide the journey of the choir in front of the ‘carpet’.
4. Finally, there is a traditional practice in the Persian textile tradition
still in existence today, where the craft of weaving involves
singing.114 Persian workers communicate with each other with
a continuous ‘sprechgesang’ (singing speech), while reminding
themselves of the order and rhythm of different colours. This
form of continuous, even ‘mantric’ communication helps the
Persian workers cooperate and concentrate for long-periods of
monotonous work.
I would like to pay special attention to the third of these four
possibilities, where the decoding of the woven pattern results in
a musical score. In this case the participants, as a choir (ideally
the same group of people who created the carpet), guided by a
conductor, create a vocal score based on the pattern of the carpet.
This results in a repertory of vocal expressions: each gesture of
the conductor can be applied to the patterns of the carpet as the
equivalent of a choral sound. This collaborative research, results in
collective action between the choir leader and choir, where they
all know which pattern motif of the carpet corresponds to which
vocal sound. This consensus enables the choir leader to conduct
using individual carpet motifs towards the creation of a musical
improvisation. This process of decoding can be carried out in
different ways according to the given time, space and interest of
114 Rosa Smits brought this tradition to our attention and a shared documentary about it with the project
partners during the Weaving Voices workshop in Amsterdam. See also: p. 79.
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