ABOUT THE PIECE

Dark Vocalise (2019) is a composition by Sara Zamboni for live voice and five-channels fixed media. It investigates the inner and deepest aspects of the female voice. The pre-recorded material consists in vocal warming up exercises from the singing practice. The piece reflects in a different way on the main function of those repetitive and progressive series of sounds. It explores the condition of the voice when it is not yet ready to perform but it is already rich of inner variations, instabilities and color nuances. 

All the sounds appearing in this piece have been recorded from the singer Elena Lorenzi, then manipulated by the composer Sara Zamboni and presented in a multichannel environment. The live performance of the singer consists in performing another complementary vocal part. She becomes a character interacting with her own voice, surrounded by her own sound world and trying to free herself from it, taking control of her voice again. 

The performer is poetically re-interpreting her own voice as a magical creature that wakes up and grows from the deepest point in a singer’s body and then projected outside. The singers, especially the ones with opera technique as a background, are used to manipulate their own voice and do this process all the time. The vocalise is ‘dark’ because not everything is beautiful and perfect in our daily practice, but working on technique consistently allows musicians, composers, dancers, creators, sporters… to achieve incredible things. Things to be proud of and worth presenting to a curious audience.

" Working with Elena Lorenzi for such a long time has given me the opportunity to make a piece about all the things that secretly take place in the daily life of a professional singer and present them in a poetic way. Because she is also a creative soul, we worked together on every detail of the staging: the light concept, the movements, the costumes… I am happy to present this piece ‘live’ once again " - Sara

VIDEO DOCUMENTATION

 THE PERFORMER

Elena Lorenzi (1984) is an Italian singer and performer. She graduated in opera singing and musicology. She is constantly exploring the different musical genres: jazz, rock, pop, chanson française, tango and symphonic metal. She also has a master's specialisation in Speech therapy and Phoniatrics for artistic vocality. 

Ballet and modern dance are part of her background. Therefore, she is very interested in the physical aspect of the performance, and she deepened this aspect attending courses such as 'The creation of a solo performance' at the Freie Universität in Berlin with Zishan Ugurlu, director of LaMama Theater in New York City.

In 2018 she started a collaboration with the London-based agency '7Stars Art', creating and performing her cabaret and vintage shows in the West-End theaters of London. She wrote and starred in 'Paris Mon Amour', 'Classic Cabaret', 'An Evening with Vivien Leigh', 'Cabaret Beyond Borders', 'Voices from the Golden Era' and her newest show 'Hasta Astor' (premiered in February 2022).

As a sing-songwriter, she created an experimental Gothic rock project under the pseudonym of Elle Noir: her two EPs are called "Blue Shadow" and "Like A Black Doll". 

In 2022, together with her best students, she created the vocal group "The Music-All Folks" to share their passion for the musical and open up to other forms of vocal exploration.