U? presents Oumar Jalloh at HE:LEEN Festival

Ugly by Oumar Jalloh

Ugly is a theatershow using dance, fashion and meme as its main way of expression. Throughout the piece Oumar Jalloh is going through a process of unraveling layers and skins. Taking on different forms regardless of the degree some people think is normal or acceptable. Remaining and daring to reveal the strangeness of being into the world.

Oumar Jalloh is a multidisciplinary artist specialized in dance. As an artist, Jalloh believes it is important to create from a place of vision—a vision where freedom in creative expression takes center stage. This vision emphasizes standing in authenticity and experiencing it as something independent.

Soundwalk

The idea of a soundwalk emerges from a general U? & Le Guess Who? approach towards music: both festivals are built around the discovery of seeing, finding and gaining knowledge of something previously unknown. Whether it’s discovering new sounds, making new connections with people, or discovering the city of Utrecht. The theme of finding, exploring and describing sounds during the walk continues this approach of curiosity towards listening experience.

The walk invites participants to think about the questions that are associated with sound studies and works of R. Murray Schafer and Michel Chion. This approach creates a new way of perceiving and interpreting sound as a unique object that exists on the border between silence and noise — and works as a primary element of any sonic experience (from nature and urban landscapes to phenomenons that are conventionally framed as "music"). To explore these questions, we'll take a group of participants on a soundwalk (~30 minutes) through HE:LEEN Festival area.

The walk will be framed with a number of simple sonic and listening exercises that facilitate and focus the attention on the sound that are found: their shape, structure and features that help listeners to distinguish them from the noise. Although the soundwalk is principally interactive, the goal is to tune yourself in to others, to the outside world — and through that "tuning" of the attention, to explore the context of everyday life as a playground for sonic discoveries.

HE:LEEN Festival

U? is part of the freely accessible day program. The festival can be visited for free during the day. In the evening, the party moves to De Helling and LE:EN for HE:LEEN+. Here you can experience up-and-coming acts from all over the Netherlands and Belgium, including Iris Jean, Yan Lâle, ECHT!, Min Taka and Luna Maki.