Chikos

CHIKOS: a Music/Perofrmance piece (2009)

Ariel Cohen in CHIKOS photo: Gadi Dagon

Chikos is a musical-theatrical composition by musician Maya Dunietz and myself, featuring two sexy performers and a system of wireless mini-speakers that were specially hacked and customized by art technologist Yair Reshef so they can that fit in the performer's mouths. The starting point for the piece were the two metaphors "don't put words in my mouth" and "you took the words out of my mouth"; metaphors that thanks to the technology we use, can be taken seriously and physically realized to an almost-ad-absurdum extent, creating a rather eerie effect. The composition is then dictated by the possibilities enveloped in the meeting point of two axes: body vs. sound and scripted vs. improvised material (both musical & performative). In the bio-technological environment it creates, the piece offers a discussion around issues such as gender, violence, physicality, competition, fetishism, militarism and singularity (among others). And it's also an opportunity to have fun.


Music/performance score by Ariel Efraim Ashbel and Maya Dunietz
With texts by: Guillaume Apollinaire, Sigmund Freud 
Performers: Efrat Aviv and Ariel Cohen
Sound & computer operation: Giori Politi
Speakers construction: Guy Lantzut & Yair Reshef 

First performance at the "Teiva" Space in Jaffa in October 2009.

Duration: 55 min

This is the last scene, where the performers' mouths are singing Maya's cover of the wonderful Calvin Johnson's "Can We Kiss":



and here is the whole thing:




Press:


"Remarkable performance [...] this is an intentionally impolite and raw piece (I was intrigued by one of my colleague's horrified looking face) but extremely funny and in it's way intellectually stimulating" (City mouse magazine, February 2010)


"The delightful dessert of the festival was "Chikos" [...], performed amazingly-insanely-flawlessly by Aviv and Cohen, featuring sexual texts and technology which creates a manipulative soundtrack while the duo play, twist, and have fun in a way that's fascinating to the audience in every single moment and gesture. [...] Don't miss it!" (habama.co.il, January 2010)


Some pix by Gadi Dagon:

In January 2011, following an invitation to participate in a conference at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem's Institute for Advanced Studies, about voice and performance, we also made Chikos Presentation, a "lecture performance" (don't you hate this term already...?) in which we present the piece and how we worked on it using the speakers in our own mouths. This is what it looked like when we were preparing it (my voice is coming from the speaker in my mouth):