In Resonant Bodies, recorder ensemble Delle Donne Consort and composer Ellen Jacobs explore how space, sound, and human connectedness influence and shape one another. Starting from the overarching theme of spatiality, the project launches an artistic research process in which Delle Donne Consort’s core principles — Creation and Audience — remain central. The project begins with the question: how does sound create space, and how does space in turn shape sound, the body, and the relationships between makers and audience?

In this program a collective creative process has been developed that probes the boundaries between “old” and “new.” The historical performance practice of tuning systems, overtones, and interval symbolism is brought into dialogue with contemporary approaches: innovative techniques, ground sounds, and resonances emerging from the acoustics of the space itself. This creates a tension between tradition and experimentation, between the human and the non-human in sound.

The artists examine how different tuning systems carry not only musical but also philosophical meaning — how they embody ideas of harmony, disorder, reason, and emotion. Within this framework, they deliberately seek out dissonance: sounds that rub, clash, or fall out of balance, as a metaphor for the frictions that arise in human relationships and in our interaction with space and technology.

Beyond pitch and harmony, attention is given to ear tones and the vibrational frequencies of objects within the space — sounds that may not always be audible but can be physically felt. These subtle vibrations form the foundation of the performance, in which the space itself is approached as an instrument.

Throughout the creative process, a “script” or manual for a space is developed — a performative score centered on the interplay between sound, body, and environment. This score explores different states of being: connection, disconnection, isolation, and dissociation. These emotional landscapes are set in dialogue with the project’s recurring themes: acoustics, the relationship to one another and to oneself, interaction with objects, the tension between old and new, and the meaning of the site in which the performance takes place.

The performance thus becomes a living study of resonance — not only of sound, but of human presence, of matter, of time, and of memory. Resonant Bodies invites the audience to become part of this sonic space: not as passive spectators, but as co-resonating bodies of vibration, breath, and space.

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