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, interviewers, 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 a Ph.D. linguist. These interviews were sampled, remixed and rearranged, as we continued to cut up our subjects’ voices, we discovered two fictional characters emerge 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.