image credit: Daryl Feehely
Embodied Dialogues is a collaboration between Iris Garrelfs and Jenn Kirby that merges body movement, wearable technology and extended vocal improvisation. The work can be presented as a solo performance by Garrelfs or as a duo with Kirby, in which both performers wear sensor garments and their movements generate and interact with sound. In the solo version, Garrelfs performs with Sensor Dress, a wearable instrument based on a dress previously worn by Garrelfs, alongside her unamplified voice. Equipped with capacitive touch sensors and motion tracking, the dress enables real-time interaction between body, garment and sound. As Garrelfs moves among the audience, her movements activate the dress’s sensors, triggering site-responsive sounds that are amplified through a handheld mono speaker, while her voice remains unprocessed. For larger spaces, an inbuilt wireless system and wireless headset can reinforce the sound, while a multichannel version is currently in development. In the duo version, the two performers’ sensor garments create an expanded dialogue between their movements, sounds and spatial positions.
The performance creates an intimate dialogue between performer, audience, body and space. The relationship between movement and sound is deliberately unpredictable, drawing on the open-ended nature of live improvisation and challenging conventional notions of control and controllers in electronic performance. The work explores how wearable technology can make the body both an instrument for sounding and a means of interacting with the surrounding space. Listening becomes an embodied and spatial practice: the performers navigate and shape the sonic environment through movement, while the audience experiences sound through changing proximity, direction and location.
A duo performance at Rich Mix in June 2926 won best NIME’s Best In Music award.
Further info about related activities alongside documentation is below.
Embodied Dialogues in action:
23-26 June 2026 – duo of ED with Jenn Kirby at Rich Mix, London, as part of NIME 2026.
Documentation:
- video made from mobile phone footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMxOrJxBrxg
——————————-
23 May 2026: duo of ED with Jenn Kirby at Hundred Years Gallery, London. Also playing will be Freida Abtan, Andrew Ciccone with Hardi Kurda.
——————————-
21 Feb 2026, 6-8pm: performance at AMATA, Falmouth University, Penryn Campus, Treliever Road, Penryn, Cornwall, TR10 9FE Also performing are Beth + Flo, Gaia Blandina.
——————————-
07 Nov 2025: premiere at V&A Storehouse East, as part of Soundhouse Storehouse Special: when objects speak and sound becomes matter, for CMMR 2025.
Documentation:
- V&A extracts: https://youtu.be/592GWuhfnRc
- Audio only, rehearsal extract: https://soundcloud.com/iris-garrelfs/embodied-dialogue-va-rehearsal-extract
- Photos, credit Daryl Feehely: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dfeehely/54906971418/in/album-72177720330149010
——————————-
21-27 July 2025: Embodied Dialogues residency with Jenn Kirby as part of VOICES ON THE EDGE, at AMATA, Treliever Road, Falmouth, Penryn TR10 9FE.
Documentation:
——————————-
21-22 June 2025: Dress Making session, Liverpool
——————————-
10 June 2025: co-presenting Embodied Dialogues: an improvised duet between Sensor Dress and voice with Jenn Kirby at International Computer Music Conference Boston (ICMC), 2pm UK time or 9am local time panel start.
——————————-
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.