The one who deals with sound creates spaces from different relationships between resonances, echoes, and physical proprieties of supposed materials, storytelling, emotional illusionism, metaphoric design or poetic forms, dealing not only with the exterior/acoustic aspects of the space being developed, but also designing sound in the roots of the story itself, the inner space. Working in a discipline that exercises an influence like almost no other on people’s daily lives, architects are faced with the constant challenge of reading and interpreting a particular space’s potential impact, using all their senses and looking at it from many different perspectives, and then enhancing its positive qualities. In the particular space that is National Sawdust, love and loss are always present as two women address a myriad of social dilemmas by transforming a collective space into a space for sacred secular dialectic through music. The music is the voice of two architects in space – Sophia Brous and Helga Davis.

Dressed in a white gown, her body angular and intensely expressive, Brous dances with the articulation of her face, eyes, hands, arms, hips. The work, Lullaby Movement, is an original performance work exploring lullaby ritual from around the world, framed as an immersive theatre song cycle in over 24 languages, learned by the artist via direct-learning research sessions with migrant and refugee communities from the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and Asia based in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S., with organizations including the Refugee Council of the U.K., the Watermill Center, and Good Chance Calais in the Jungle camp, Calais.

Originally commissioned by Urbantheatre Projects for the Sydney Festival 2015, Brous was joined at National Sawdust by musicians Leo Abrahams, Todd Reynolds, and Mauro Refosco. Brous stands as an architectural element in an intimate futuristic space, looking up at a constellation of disks dangling from the ceiling, her voice gently caressing the room as if she were trying to give and receive vibrations, or rather, absorb any pain that was present and transform it into love. Lilting, vulnerable, at times, haunting, her vocals offer a stark illustration of the singer’s ability to convey emotion. Extended notes and breathy modulations, Brous catches your ear, reaches the mind, with an emotional power that of a scientist in a sonic laboratory, manipulating pitch controls in order to conjure the voices of many women: a 90-year-old Latvian former ballerina and poet; a Ugandan refugee; Nigerian migrant workers in Australia; a Croatian mother in the company of her daughter; a Vietnamese woman wandering through the streets of London; a group of Ugandan women caring for each other’s children as they embark upon a day’s journey to find work.

Brous accomplishes the voices of these women through the lullabies they sing to their own children in their own language, giving insight into the knowing realm of what is ancient and contemporary, born at the intersection of migration and memory. Her voice, as a singing bowl of voices, is searching for a tongue, a language, a means of articulation through testimony and spiritual silence born of the heart, translated into the mad joyous blood of secrets touching the imperceptibly of life interwoven through a succession of seasons given to brutal experience. Sometimes there is peace. Sometimes there is catastrophe. The two are never separate.

Sophia Brous in Lullaby Movement
Photograph: Jill Steinberg

Requiem for a Tuesday is explained in the program notes as “a ceremony administered by singers… where those assembled are invited to overcome fear by seeing each other. In this ceremony, music opens a space for the assembled to witness and thus face collective and individual engagements of mortality and fear. In taking part in such an act, the assembled will, perchance, understand that these actions are universal and thus fear of the other is not necessary as there is, in fact, no other.”

Davis, dressed in tones of black and grey and joined by hooded bass-baritone Davóne Tines (accompanied by jazz pianist Marc Cary and the improvisational string quartet PUBLIQuartet), enters the space from the collective of the audience, singing retooled original songs written by Davis and Lou Reed as well as Negro spirituals arranged by Grammy award/Pulitzer prize-winning singer/violinist Caroline Shaw. The lyrics of the first spiritual, sung by Tines, rip through the air with chilling effect

Some bright morning when this life is over
I’ll fly away
To that home on God’s celestial shore
I’ll fly away
I’ll fly away, oh glory
I’ll fly away in the morning
When I die, hallelujah by and by
I’ll fly away
When the shadows of this life have gone
I’ll fly away
Like a bird from these prison walls I’ll fly
I’ll fly away
I’ll fly away, oh glory
I’ll fly away in the morning
When I die, hallelujah by and by
I’ll fly away
Oh, how glad and happy when we meet
I’ll fly away
No more cold iron shackles on my feet
I’ll fly away

Davis follows with a ballad, “Question/Answer,” her voice scaling from tenor to soprano, at times softly stroking a note, at others scraping against a hardened surface, trying to break through it.

Sitting on opposite ends of the stage, Davis and Tines create a duality of space to the world they live in: all the dyads of plurality, so beautiful and so mysterious as to encompass the enigmatic matters of death. Like Brous, they are also conjuring dislocated bodies and questioning the ethical, politico-cultural, aesthetic, destinal value of a constitution; the meaning of the self in relation to others within the strangeness of being … always defying what is expected, known, defined or coded. A group of male dancers (Reggie “Regg Roc” Gray and The D.R.E.A.M. Ring) illuminate the point, performing both as individuals and in groups to choreography created by the ensemble itself, the dancers utilizing breathtakingly beautiful movements to tell deeply human and sometimes heart-wrenching stories that address these troubling issues of the contemporary black body. Crossing bridges between their urban existence and the expansiveness of space, with movement characterized by flex dancing born out of Jamaican reggae halls and Brooklyn dance clubs, they pause, contort, glide, snap their joints across the stage, only to find themselves brutally torn from the earth too soon.

It is a dance, as Katherine Dunham once said of ritualized movement, “of a people deracinated, denied full participation in a society in which they are obliged to live, inevitably turning backwards toward ritualized beliefs”. Through the physicality of sound and dance, the work creates, rather than destroys, bridges between human bodies and space. In no way can we exist in separation from space – space surrounds us. We move through a continuum of exceedingly diverse spaces of varying types and sizes. We perceive the expansiveness of a landscape, by moving through it. We see and are seen according to the viewpoint space allows. It is the composition of relationships between density and openness that determine our expression. Spaces are formed with different identities, inviting people to linger or merely functioning as transit areas. Places and buildings that create a sense of identity are an essential component of our cultural roots. They offer points of reference and anchorage in a globalized, continually changing world.

When Davis admonishes an audience member to put her cell phone away in order to “be here now in this room with us where we are”, she smiles and ends the work with “Wanna,” encouraging the audience to sing along:

It’s clear to me that yours is the face I see
it’s clear to me
so dear to me
it’s you before me wanting me
so dear to me
And now that you are here with me there’s beauty in everything I see
And now that you are here with me there’s nothing but poetry in every word you speak
I dream a garden with colors that stretch towards infinity
when I awake it’s blossoms are dancing within me
Wanna be your heart and beat for you
wanna be your eyes and see for you
wanna be your lungs and breathe for you
wanna be your soul and be for you
wanna be your voice and scream for you
wanna be your hope and dream for you
wanna be your prayers and answer you
wanna live this life and love for you

It becomes clear that whatever the differing political, social, and cultural characteristics that influence our perception and critical judgment and shape our actions and reflections, the space we dare to co-inhabit is built through sensory impressions and interaction, and understanding the interaction between human beings and spaces requires exploration and personal participation. This space we are in here and now belongs to all of us, and all of us are its architects.

Carl Hancock Rux is an award-winning poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, and recording artist.