It seemed natural to me at that time, as a performing artist, that
the next step was to performe Primal Singing in public. After the
personal experience and its achievements, I started to do
performances in Primal Singing, in the first instance in small venues
such as yoga centres, where I offered a theoretical introduction to
what Primal Singing was about, followed by a demonstration of it. I
also travelled to Lalita, a retreat in the depths of Extremadura's
countryside, to deliver demonstrations, and my demonstrations started
to become more participative, such that by the end of them the
audience would have the chance to choose what emotions I was going to
work on.
This second stage, going public, was risky as one could not have
predicted beforehand how the audience would respond to it; but at the
same time these were very exciting times. I got a great deal of
feedback from a variety of audiences who had not necessarily been
exposed to contemporary music before then. In most of the cases
something very interesting came out of it: if you authentically feel
the feeling, it resonates with the audience
irrespective of the
form, structure, or
modality that the music
takes. Is that perhaps what some contemporary music was
sometimes lacking, and why it was hard to engage audiences with it?
Over recent decades a lot of very complex music has been written that
demands a great deal of intellectual and physical effort to produce
with exactitude, and yet perhaps at the cost of feeling being lost …
But I couldn’t find other people who were following this path I
had chosen, so I went on performing and asking for feedback from my
audiences.
I graduated from smaller to more major venues. I performed Primal
Singing for University Felipe II (Aranjuez-Madrid) in front of a
large audience who for the most part did not have any background in
listening to atonal music. The result was very much the same: people
engaged with it when there was emotion, and improvisation was a huge
enhancer of those emotions and the engagement with the audiences.
Contemporary musician and composer Francis Garcia had the
opportunity to listen to one of my experimental performances of
Primal Singing, and proposed that he collaborate with me and
integrate virtual synthesisers in my performances. Voice and
synthesisers became a stable duo, performing under the name Punto
Zero. It was clear to us that Primal Singing had a cathartic effect
and the potential to release people and emotions. We reflected this
idea in short videos entitled Primal Elements and Primal Catharsis,
under the direction of Gui Campos.
More experiments took place, and modes of interaction explored,
some reacting to touch, as at minute 2.30 of the video 'Hace faltaser...',
for example, in which I am blindfolded and take my cue for
vocalisation solely from and in response to my arm being manipulated
by a workshop participant.
Francis and I started to meet regularly to explore sound, emotion
and improvisation together, and ended up producing several shows that
were taken into the theatre.
A
recommended illustrative video of such a performance is published online as 'Punto Cero: Primal Elements'.
That was, I would say, the culmination of this second stage of the
development of Primal Singing, in which I felt confident to perform
in front of an audience, and sufficiently well trained to have the
necessary awareness for engaging with the audience and at the same
time to 'let flow' with no fear, emotions and aesthetic fleeting
impressions provoked in and by the very moment itself. Primal
Singing became very much 'singing the moment'.
By this time I felt confident in delivering Primal Singing in
front of an audience, but much more was yet to come.
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