hum (Toronto, Canada)
www.humdansoundart.ca

hum is an interdisciplinary performing arts company dedicated to the creation and dissemination of highly innovative, powerfully communicative, and transformative performances, rooted in emotion, that connect with audiences on a fundamentally human level. In an ongoing exploration of the boundaries between movement, sound, theatre, improvisation, and other media, Artistic Director Susanna Hood and avant-garde composer/musician Nilan Perera have built a dynamic and emotionally charged repertoire, critically acclaimed across Canada. The works’ roots lie in basic human emotion and experience; what is felt in the gut universally, prior to language, manifests in the dialogue between voice and movement within the human body. In creation, they draw on a working palette they have been honing since 1988, where the sound-scape is created by the manipulation of Susanna’s amplified voice. It is wordless storytelling in the moment of performance through physical music.

“Hood rivets the eye, and her performances are like a primal scream.” – Paula Citron

Touring Programs
Tours with 2 dancers

NEW WORK IN DEVELOPMENT
Description to come soon. A trio embarking on Susanna Hood’s continued exploration of music and movement collaboration. This ingenious new work will be available to tour in 2010.

She’s gone away
This piece uses sound generated by live voice through electronic voice recorders on top of music. She's gone away is a 55 minute one-woman performance piece using dream and memory to touch on themes of sexuality, female power, healing, and loss of innocence, "She's gone away" is spoken through the combined language of movement, song, poetic text, instrumental music, and visual design.

A moment of sexual suspension, caught in mid-flight, a woman in the fragmented home of her mind battles to stay in her body. She spins us through a continuous cycle of animal states that simultaneously provide both the escape from and the clues back to her integrated self. This highly charged physical and emotional journey throws us into the depths of voracity, bravado, dread, despair, and release.

still – An emotionally charged 40-minute solo by and for Susanna Hood, still takes you on a journey through an infernal landscape of dream and memory, at one moment plummeting into darkness, the next blossoming into light. Its thematic structure draws on both a recurring dream/nightmare and traumatic childhood memory of sexual abuse. T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Dante’s Inferno also inspire elements of the piece. This work embodies color through sound and movement.

Waking en-dessous – This piece deals with presence and absence and uses abstract word and sound play. The musician converses with the dancer on stage in a lighted box that they cannot leave. There is an underworld quality to this work that is best described as a poem of movement, word and music based on the states of presence and absence, the voyage from one to the other, and the threshold in between.

Dialogues
This depicts a conversation of a long-term relationship with physical music. It is entirely improvised and uses voice, manipulation, and electric guitar. This work is very low tech and can be done anywhere. It is all by chance – the musician and dancer have been working together for over a decade and so there is a vague structure, but they really show the audience the raw history of two people in conversation and embodying sound.