Kitka & Svetlana Spajic: To The Singers of Tales January 27, 2012

Friday-Sunday, January 27-29, 8 PM

In her Bay Area debut, Serbian singer and performance artist Svetlana Spajic, featured earlier this year in Robert Wilson's "The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic", joins vocal ensemble Kitka in a new vocal-theater work exploring the power and sophistication of ancient oral traditions.

Spajic's artistic work is dedicated to the preservation and transmission of a set of oral practices and traditions that descend back in time more than 3000 years. Albert Lord's seminal work on the subject, "The Singer of Tales" (1960), is rooted in a study of contemporary Yugoslav folk poets whom he and his colleague Millman Parry discovered to be still practicing oral formulas as a means of creating their songs and epics. Next year marks the 100th anniversary of Lord's birth, and Spajic's performance with Kitka, entitled "To the Singers of Tales", is in part an homage to his book and its now generally accepted theory of "oral-formulaic composition".

For over two decades Spajic has traveled her native Serbia and the surrounding Balkans, carefully researching and recording the songs and stories of the villagers she meets. Her work there has been mutually beneficial. Following the end of the Balkan wars in the 1990s, Spajic found many of the elder men and women had stopped singing, and her time with them has been credited with breaking their period of mournful silence.

Spajic has made her special expertise the study of non-tempered a cappella singing and its unique vocal techniques and ornamentation. She has collaborated with some of the best traditional singers of the world including Hronis Aidonidis, Domna Samiou, Yanka Rupkina, Bokan Stankovic. She has also collaborated with Marina Abramovic, Boris Kova, Stella Chiweshe, Balkan Beat Box, Sainkho Namchylak, Anthony, and Boban Markovic.

Oakland's Kitka has earned international recognition for its distinctive sound, exploring a vast palette of ancient yet contemporary-sounding vocal effects.

Official Website: http://www.kitka.org