Art Office

Total Control is Ash Kilmartin's plan for a small experimental choir. With this she wants to explore how improvised vocal experiments as a group can influence feelings of well-being, fears and insecurities. To do this, Kilmartin wanted to set up a small, intergenerational ensemble of trained and untrained voices. This is to give a voice to individual feelings that people go through, based on the idea of ​​collectivity, communality. “My fundamental conception of the voice is that it always exceeds itself: our voice never says all it knows, nor does it know all that it says. She is the hinge between our private selves and the public space that is formed by speaking, singing or simply breathing together.” She wanted this to result in a semi-scripted, semi-improvised performance work, co-produced by Worm.

In 2015, Kilmartin from New Zealand settled in Rotterdam, where she opened the Life art space on Keileweg. There she brings artists and craftsmen together in total installations and exhibitions with an ode to the creative process. This fits in with her own interdisciplinary artistic practice in which she writes, makes radio and performs. On her project 'Allegory of the Listening Demon' in Syb in 2019, she teamed up with a choir. Total Control fits in with that, but is now focused on how singing can contribute to our common well-being. The R&D committee thought it was an original proposal within an interesting and special area of ​​work, written from a very clear starting point.

Kilmartin started the plan by taking lessons with Janneke van der Putten. She learned to listen to the body and breathing, through voice and body exercises. She also started working with radio: every two weeks she broadcasted about the research on Worm radio, which resulted in an engaged audience. Due to corona, the choir could not yet be put together, but Kilmartin started writing the script, with mourning as the theme. As soon as possible, she wanted to investigate collective vocalization with singing and group sessions, in order to work towards a final performance in UBIK through discussion and exercises. After that, she wants to perform it elsewhere in the Netherlands and in Europe, through Worm's festival and distribution network. The entire project resulted in her good connections with radio makers in Rotterdam, so that she even became a program manager for Radio Worm.