Anya asked us to find a location ‘a little different’ from the spaces we would usually crowd into. She was frustrated by continually finding herself on stage, towering above the crowd, unwilling to address herself to them. She refused to understand the concept of an audience, saying, moreover, that the ‘the place of the spectator shouldn’t still be justified’. This theory had caused her no shortage of frustrations; it was suspected that she wanted to bring the search for new ideologies into the musical milieu.
One happily rainy November, I was invited by the CPH DOX festival to show a retrospective of my films, and Niklas insisted that I organise a last-minute session. We would have liked to regroup a part of the young Danish scene, like we had done around Slaraffenland a few months before. But I was tired, and for the first time the prospect of hearing voices sing in English struck me as bizarre.
We remembered, though, the 7 women who had come
to sing us a rare nursery rhyme that very same night. I had met Anja, their leader, in Kristiania’s alleyways by chance one night, and asked her what she could come up with. She said that she finally wanted to practice what she had learned on her many travels.
The girls needed two hours of silence before they began singing. They closed themselves off into one of the rooms of the tiny apartment we had found right downtown. We let bodies filter in during this time, under the order that they not pronounce a word. The atmosphere, at first light and buzzy in consideration of the strange rules, quickly became tense, even irritating to some of the people present. All the while, Anja, sure of her experience, took her time with the girls, playing off the unease brought on by silence. It was a good hour later than promised that the ‘Valby vocal group’ headed towards the loft and began their first incantations.
Their procedure, their organisation could be surprising. The work was the result of a sharp consciousness of the world – it was the time to enter into the famous ‘third phase of integration’ – that which specialists and scientists from all cultures have difficulty discerning, but which the 21st century artist understands well. After the rediscovery of tradition, after its popular perversion, comes the period of renewal, that of the return to the sacred by the new believers. That night, Valby Vokalgruppe brought nothing but a deeper experience, knowing well that, after McLuhan, the long search leads towards ‘a scientific return to magic’.
http://valbyvokalgruppe.blog.com/
Translated by Tara Dominguez
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