Cookie Consent by Free Privacy Policy website Human Signs by Yuval Avital: Global participatory online dance and voice artwork
may 25, 2020 - Human Signs

Human Signs by Yuval Avital: Global participatory online dance and voice artwork


In collaboration with Stefania Ballone, Franco Covi, Niccolò Granieri, Tychonas Michailidis and Monkeys Video Lab.

Weekly ensembles every Tuesday at 7.30 pm CET at youtube.com/yuvalavital

The art project #humansigns interprets the viral aesthetic of this unique historical moment, gathering over 100 performers from all over the world, through a powerfully expressive multimedia fresco. 

During these lasts months, we have developed a new relationship with our own body. We feel it more than ever as a form for our existence and as an anchor point for our being and everything that happens around us. We have also learnt a biological necessity that has to express itself in a condition of forced reclusion, manifesting in the two most fundamental forms of humanity: gesture and voice.

Human Signs is born in this conceptual and physical frame, the first entirely #online art project by #yuvalavital, Israeli composer and multimedia artist, who lives in Milan and works with BUILDING. Avital is well known to the public for his immersive creations in which the sonic element is continuously present - music being his first medium of expression - which often is accompanied by visual images and icons which connect us to a precise archetype.

Like a virus, Avital had entered, through the screen, the houses of artists from all over the world, offering them a cantus firmus: an audio-visual selfie of the duration of around 12 minutes, where the artist emerges in a sort of a mantric vocalism. Yuval asked the artists to create a dialogue with the mantra, either with their voice or their body, to film themselves with any available device and to send him the result. It was also an invitation to the artist to extend the virus-video in a potentially infinite chain.

The collected videos are grouped into different ensembles and shared in different chapters weekly through a sort of virtual stage. Soloists of classical ballet and contemporary dance together with vocal artists and masters of the most ancient traditional chants are united and nested one to another with the intent of creating a global multimedia fresco: a dense overlapping of polyphonies and images, transmitting an honest and intimate art testimony.

“The human voice” - Avital Says - “is an essential element in both my music and art creation, but I rarely use my own voice. In this moment however, I felt that I needed to exteriorise my fear, vulnerability, longing, moaning, hope, nudity and all the feelings emerging in these days with violence in the most direct manner, without filters”.

To create this ambitious initiative, it was necessary to bring together a multidisciplinary team, which embraced Avital’s artistic challenge: Stefania Ballone, dancer and choreographer from Teatro alla Scala and dance curator of the project. Thanks to her own experience, Ballone brings the world of international and high-level ballet and contemporary dance within the project, coordinating the dancers throughout the process, from the moment of the selection to the finished artwork. Niccolò Granieri and Tychonas Michailidis - both lecturers at the Digital Media Technology Lab of Birmingham City University - curate respectively the computational generative system and the sound conforming; Monkeys Video Lab, responsible of video editing of the different ensembles and Franco Covi for the editing of the weekly live-stream.

The first ensemble of #humansigns had been presented #online on 12th May on Yuval’s YouTube channel. The next chapters, with an approximate duration of 90 minutes, will be presented weekly on the same platform, every Tuesday at 7:30 pm CET.

Related news

august 24, 2015
july 01, 2015

Press release available only in Italian An unconventional concert, an extraordinary opportunity see four great performers talent u...

From July 8th till August 29th 2015, the Cattedrale-building at La Fabbrica del Vapore (The Steam Factory) in Milan will host a un...