Maja Jantar
VOICE
Maja Jantar
Belgium
Maja Jantar is a director, performer, vocal artist and visual artist.
Born as daughter of opera singers, she spends her childhood travelling through Europe with her mother, enters and exits various languages, cultures; nomadic migrant, balances between the opera world and playing in her grandma’s garden, between ducks, sheep and sunset.
Distant Tartar descendants echo’s in her soundings – weaving the operatic, poetic, abstract influences together to vocal sound works that landscape into performance. Organic materials, red cord, lines, patterns emerge in the various facets of her work, in an attempt to bind and connect, weaving the sound into the red; reading the lines; adding to the playful concepts of her operatic productions; creating book works of liquid sound made solid, installations of floating pages gone silent.
In performance she invites to enter the field of the imaginary, the inner world, the inner stream, the shamanistic, enchanting, prophetic. Circumventing the stage of the rational, in an attempt to enter through the back door of the intuitive. Sometimes aided by video work exploring nature’s patterns and rhythms or visual scores, or books bound out of old action paintings.
In opera she works intuitively, her background enables her to engage with the matter at a level of great ease and understanding. Working with the singers in an atmosphere of joy to catalyze their uniqueness into unity. Her concepts are poetic in various ways, be it story based, like turning a whole symphonic orchestra into Alice from Alice in Wonderland, be it poetic in the way the various aspects of the performance are ordered to create a meta-poem.
Her formation in visual arts creates a red line through her work, be it in the scores, the books, the scenography of her opera productions. Creating work not merely with the idea of exhibit in mind, but to be used, to be manipulated, to be transformed.
