About the performance

Ululalia! is a performance/installation project for children and their guardians that brings them right inside the human voice in a spirit of fun, delight, and wonder, with an emphasis on vocal creativity. Science and arts combine as participants explore sound, see how the human voice is produced and record their own ‘magic sounds’ to generate a visual environment.

Key Personnel

Yvon Bonenfant - Artistic director of project
Ghislaine Granger - Consultant producer
Ali Maclaurin - Visual and object designer for voice play environments

Production Information

Running time at full length: 1 hour

Suitable for children 5 to 10 years old and their guardians.

Medium use of text

Use of live music

Does not require a clear understanding of English or another language.
Performance can be adapted to other languages with ease particularly french.

Touring Information

Small scale show (up to 400 seats)- 30-35 children per hour for 6 hours per day can be accomodated.

A venue with two distinct spaces for the children to visit (theatre, arts centre, gallery) would be most appropriate.

Number of people on tour: 5

Number of performers on stage: 2

Tour availability:
Beacons- from October 2011 onward (dates to be negotiated)
Ululalia (the Voice Play project)- from October 2012.

Suitable for rural touring

Outreach and Educational Work

The performance itself is educational and facilitates the development of vocal play for children, and will be accompanied by a child-friendly interactive website exploring some of the themes of the installation-performances.

After the R & D phase, and preceding the subsequent tour of the work, we intend to collaborate with educational specialists to make a fun and exciting workbook which teachers and families can use at home or in class to stimulate interest in how the voice works. Given schools', students' and the general public's upswell in interest around popular singing techniques (thanks to commercial television programmes like the X Factor and Glee), this work makes space for children to play with the voice in ways that don't require them to be 'good singers' but that creates a space within which they can feel good about what their voices can do.

Company History

Yvon Bonenfant's unusual yet highly engaging work extends vocal art across media. He has made small and medium scale performance, installation, video and media art, and artist's books, hybridizing live and performance art, the theatrical and experimental music, often in collaboration with visual specialists.

Since relocating to the UK in 2002, his works have been shown in Brazil, Canada, Estonia, France, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, the US, and the UK. In 2009 he was artist in residence at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre, New York State, USA. Since November 2010, his painting/voice/video installation B(earth) with Ludivine Allegue has shown in Granada, Spain for four weeks; video extracts from B(earth) were shown at the Sound Thoughts Festival, Glasgow. He has performed live with the vocal-videodancework *Intimacies* at the Pieces to Fit event, Brighton; his textile integrated, collaborative artist's book/CD Soie Soyeuse was exhbited as part of Serial Artists at Galerie Talmart, Paris. His voice-videoart music-theatre piece Beacons tours the UK with Arts Council of England support in October 2011. www.yvonbonenfant.com

Recent Productions / Tours

A. Beacons: voice/video art theatrical show - bringing together live and recorded extended vocal performance, and sensual, three-screen video projection of flashing beacon lights to explore coming and going, longing and loss. Beacons borrows from popular, jazz, extended vocal/classical traditions to create a sonic and visual enivironment that tells stories about the strength of love and of saying goodbye to those we have lost. Commissioned by Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre, Troy, New York www.empac.rpi.edu. Funded by Arts Council of England for an autumn 2011 tour, 4-minute trailer at http://www.yvonbonenfant.com/?cat=17,

B. • B(earth) voice/painting/video installation with Ludivine Allegue, painter and video artist, exhibited in Granada, Spain at Sala da Arte Rey dos Chico, November 2010; video excerpts shown at Sound Thought Festival, Glasgow 2011; exhibited at Talmart Gallery, Paris; ATRiUM, Cardiff; Alsager Gallery, 2008-9; Various documents at http://www.yvonbonenfant.com/?cat=21

Reviews

“Bonenfant’s extraordinary extended vocal technique is capable of seemingly inverting subjective states of trauma and love so that he wears them on the outside. The sight and sound of his vocal body, plunging, gliding and weaving in and out of the richly layered and immersive audiovisual setting, comes as close as anything I have experienced to dissolving oppositions between visual and aural, detached and immersive, objective and subjective, air and flesh.” – Ross Brown, acclaimed sound designer and author of Sound: a Reader in Theatre Practice