JUDAICA: AN EMBODIED LABORATORY FOR SONG-ACTION

Judaica is a joint project of Urban Research Theater and the Centre for Psychophysical Performance Research at the University of Huddersfield in England, with major support from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.

From the project announcement:

The Judaica project is a laboratory for new embodied technique in the field of song-action. The core of the project is six months of full-time embodied research involving three skilled practitioners in a studio laboratory. These embodied researchers will explore the intersection of song (rhythm, resonance, vocables, musicality, timbre) and psychophysical action (movement, intention, association, impulse) in order to develop new technique in this area.

The starting point for the work is a set of recorded songs, drawn from Jewish archival sources and divided into two categories: nigunim (tunes) and piyutim (poems). The laboratory research will be comprehensively documented and its results will be shared through live research presentations in the United Kingdom, United States, and Poland.

A more detailed academic summary of the project can be downloaded here.