WALLI HÖFINGER & TERESA BRAYSHAW

10-11-12: This project is a response to a shared desire to speak about being women in a process of transition through biological, social and political change.

THE MIDDLE

Finding ourselves in the middle ground, middle aged, mid-career and menopausal, we embarked on a journey of finding words, sounds and songs to share our lived experiences of being in the world.

As artists, as teachers and friends with something to say about how it feels to be alive from the perspective of being in our mid-fifties, we began writing and producing stories.

We embraced the idea and practice of developing a slow research process and have shared our work with audiences at various online and in person festival platforms including the Roy Hart Vocal Research Centre, Malérargues, France; Gateshead International Festival of Theatre (GIFT) UK; the Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (ESMAE) Porto, Portugal and the House of Arts and Literature in Pécs, Hungary (forthcoming).

Who are these female time travellers who keep showing up in our stories?

THE DIALOGUE

Working in tandem, over an extended period of time, which included two years of lockdown in one form or another, our conversations ranged over wide terrain and across territory.

Heat and Sweat
Lifelines and Lineages
Embodying the Archive

The following questions re-emerged as we navigated our way through the process:

How could we travel lightly on the earth?

Who are these female time travellers who keep showing up in our stories?

What sort of artists are lurking under the skin of our bodies trying to get out?

How will we ‘find forms to accommodate the mess’? (Beckett)

We were born on December 10 and 11 in 1966.

UMBILICAL CHORDS

The idea of making a full concept album, which we could share with our professional communities and wider audiences came from feedback we received in response to our first tracks Looking Towards Poland and You Change It All.

The eventual collection of musical material will gather works made in a range of forms including spoken word, song, utterance and critical conversations under the album title Umbilical Chords.

Bernhard Bamberger
sound & editing
composition

Walli Höfinger
writing & voice
composition

Teresa Brayshaw
writing & voice

All dialogue is a monologue which somebody else witnesses

TERESA BRAYSHAW

Born 1966 in England. Teresa Brayshaw is a theatre maker, teacher and Feldenkrais Practitioner (FGUK 2013), who lives in Manchester and works at Leeds Beckett University and Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, London.

She works as a director, researcher and collaborator across a number of international, interdisciplinary and intergenerational EU Funded projects including Cinage Live, ATIPIA, Weaving Voices as well as practice led research collaborations with Professor Catherine Laws.

She co-edited both the 20th & 21st Century Performance Readers (2013, 2020 Routledge). She speaks English and Spanish.

WALLI HÖFINGER

Born 1966 in Austria. Walli Höfinger is a performance artist, voice performer and accredited Roy Hart Voice Center Teacher (Malérargues, France 2009) who lives and works at Gutshof Reichenow near Berlin.

Her artistic work currently focuses on experimental work on the voice, writing her own texts as well as voice and piano compositions. She works equally solo and collaborates with Christiane Hommelsheim, Jonathan Hart-Makwaia, Biliana Voutchkova, Ingo Reulecke, Teresa Brayshaw, and others.

She regularly teaches voice workshops in Germany and throughout Europe. She speaks German, English and French.

BERNHARD BAMBERGER

Born in 1964 in Austria. Bernhard Bamberger studied sound engineering as well as film directing and screenwriting at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna.
He works as a sound designer and film editor in Vienna.
For UMBILICAL CHORDS he collaborates on the creation of soundscapes and supervises the recording, mixing and mastering of the entire project.

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