Music for your Eyes is a collaborative audio-visual performance by guest Italian duo Luca Ciarla (violin, electronics, and toy instruments) and Keziat (video art and installations). It was first performed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in March 2018 as part of the For Once programme.

Sound emerges slowly and experimentally in Music for your Eyes. Generated through a small sonic receptor being scraped, tapped and brushed up against the walls and the body, it is looped and manipulated in real-time until a recognisable pattern, a song, emerges. Images appear, projected onto the walls. Curiously abstract, they feature crumpled tissue paper and pre-recorded drawings. Chairs grow into ladders and snails crawl across the screen.

Ciarla produces a violin and plays in time with the unfolding drawings, guiding audiences through cityscapes, out of birdcages, and alongside frenetic linework. Later, a pair of dancers emerge and perform a sequence alongside the activity of sound and image.

All of this serves to pursue the central provocation of the performance – the act of seeing music; of illustrating sound. It is through this singular, but playfully experimental pursuit that Music for your Eyes builds up a brief and immersive performance. It is a work that showcases the musician, the dancer, the visual artist and the innumerable ideas and possibilities that emerge when one begins to challenge and play with conventional media in novel ways.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

DANCERS | Darkroom Contemporary: Lee Kotze, Llewellyn Afrika, Joy Millar & Kayla Schulttze
VIOLINIST | Luca Ciarla
VISUALS & INSTALLATION | Keziat Terracciano