NOBODY SPEAKS

Nobody Speaks was a multimedia theatrical performance presented in collaboration with Flam Chen Pyrotechnic Theater Company as the 2008 headliner for the Tucson Poetry Festival. Nobody Speaks was our first major production as a group, pulling together our talents as videographers, animators, ethnographers, and samplers of our given surroundings.

The video and written material of Nobody Speaks was based on a series of interviews conducted by Verbo•bala with real people from all walks of life, from a rural Mexican farmer to a Canadian Ph.D. linguist. These interviews were sampled, remixed and rearranged. As we continued to cut up the voices of our subjects, two additional characters emerged from the process: Somebody and Nobody. The final presentation was a poetic spectacle of media, with the characters performing in front of a video landscape entirely sampled from places seen and inhabited throughout Mexico in 2008.