Julia Biłat BLUR

Solo concert – Cello, Voice

Photo: (c) Fabio Dondero

Julia Biłat BLUR Solo concert – Cello, Voice

An ambiguous, uncategorised experience in the dark basement. What is certain: music, the musician‘s body and voice, extreme sonorities, a cello, a chair and you.

Acts of invocation

Julia Biłat’s performances are acts of invocation. Figures emerge that have their own voices, movements, rhythms and pictorial form. Summoned by Biłat’s intense and focussed presence, they also, at times, appear to conjure themselves. There is, therefore, a delicate interplay between invocation - the act of calling upon a being – and incantation – the act of enchantment or of casting a magic spell. In both of these ritual processes, the use of voice is central. Julia Biłat’s voices are many as she repeatedly offers herself as a medium: a carefully-tuned, virtuosic vessel. In her hands, the cello becomes a virtuosic vessel of incantation.

Who is called into being? Who is enchanted?

After witnessing Julia Biłat’s performance at Teatr ADAMA, the Latin American legend of La Llorona came to my mind. La Llorona is a spirit or ghost who eternally mourns the loss of her children. She wanders through the night … through space and time … wailing, as if to fulfill an essential but ultimately incomplete catharsis for an entire community.
In the darkened theater, the cello issues an eerie sound resembling wind blowing across a desolate, decimated landscape while a woman’s voice, rising above the wind, becomes evermore mournful until it realizes its full-bodied lament. For me, Biłat became a lamenting Llorona, singing in Polish, circling the stage, incanting her version of the song Taki pejzaż.

… After the Dreams  
The corpses are running

Such a landscape
Such a landscape

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Julia Biłat

Julia Biłat, a classically trained cellist and improviser with a highly personal set of tools, expands the form of the solo concert, organically melding the roles of performer and musician. In her music and her creations, the boundary between what is composed and what is improvised, between the anarchic and the structured, melts.

www.juliabilat.com

www.instagram.com/julia_bilat