ZYG is an artistic experience in an immersive space where music and dance intersect to explore the boundaries between communication, informal play, the discovery of the senses and the instinct for art. Specifically designed for children aged 0 to 36 months in an intimate, unique and innovative format, ZYG is both an installation and a performance, an invitation to the imagination, to amazement, listening to the construction of a poetry-of-the-moment, made up of sounds, forms and gestures.
DEDICATED TO COLWYN TREVARTHEN
ZYG has resulted from a partnership between Companhia de Música Teatral, Fábrica das Artes, and dybwikdans, with the support of the Cultural Footprint | First Steps programme. It is an “educational-artistic constellation” with a core on a scenic device populated by sound where a performance constructed in real time takes place.
Around this experience orbit other complementary initiatives which seek to widen the repercussions of the central idea, particularly a talk-performance or training action so as to communicate to the general public and educational and artistic stakeholders some of the principles guiding our ideas concerning artistic creation for children and the importance of the arts as an instrument for social and human development.
ZYG starts as a poetic space: a house, a womb, an egg, a living being, or all of this or none of this, perhaps just an invitation to imagine.
An open structure, in communication with the exterior, when the dialogue between the emptiness of the organic lines of the wood creates the sensation of a delimited space which emanates a sonic mantle where electronic sounds, a sound scape, human voice, objects or alternating instruments co-inhabit, some with memories of previous products designed for the little ones. An intimate, cosy space inviting you to come in and be, and to hear and see many different personal forms, the various “voices” following various possible paths unravelled through listening, whether from the ear or any other form of understanding the vibration emanating from the space
In the ZYG performance the installation intersects with dance and an experience mediated by an “interactor” is proposed (a dancer who constructs their discourse through their body in real time, as a result of the relationships between the sound, scenic elements and the children and adults who enter the space). The performance is intimate in nature and focuses on the close involvement of the participants: the dialogue is constructed for 20 minutes, is always different and explores non-verbal, body and voice elements of communication, in a delicate balance of equilibrium between the various universes proposed by the installation and its public. The performance is structured through all the “body archives” which the exploration of space and music has enabled us to construct throughout the process of creation, through the “grammar” of communicative developments which we have observed in our various projects with small children, and the idea of Communicative Musicality proposed by Colwyn Trevarthen which has inspired us through close contact, and above all through the “readiness” and “openness” for the here and now.
