Irena Z. Tomažin

Irena Tomažin completed her BA in philosophy at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. She is active as a maker and performer in the fields of experimental improvised music and movement theatre. She also teaches voice and movement workshops called moved by voice nationally and abroad.

She has released three albums: Crying Game, Taste of Silence, and Lump in the Throat. Her music, more specifically her sound experimentation is an exploration of the landscapes of voice that include words, fragments of texts, (traditional) melodic singing, and other vocal techniques, including humming, clicking, and other sounds made with the mouth that pertain not (only) to the voice but also to the body.

Irena performs solo and with a variety of ensembles and musicians such as Tomaž Grom, Lee Patterson, Xavier Charles, Christof Kurzmann, Jonas Kocher, Gaudenz Badrutt, Šalter Ensemble, Tim Blechmann, Michael Zerang, Liz Allbee, Alessandra Eramo, Ilia Belorukov, Okkyung Lee, Maja Osojnik, Christian Kesten, Ina Puntar, Dré Hočevar, Matej Bonin, and others.

She has performed her solo project iT or as experimental vocalist at numerous national and international festivals (Zagreb, Belgrade, Skopje, Dobia, Vienna, Biel, Basel, Geneva, Budapest, Berlin, Baltimore, Wels, Tokyo, Kyoto, Kassel, Wuppertal, Wroclaw, Paris, Manchester, Beirut).

Her compositions for voice and body were published in the books "Une exposition à être lue" and "Chorégraphier" by Mathieu Copeland and performed in Geneva, Paris, and Madrid.

She has created nine voice-movement performances exploring the connections between voice, gesture, body, space, and sound.

Irena regularly leads workshops on voice and movement. Over the last years, she has given regular workshops in Slovenia and in Berlin, but has also taught in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Austria, Poland, Belgium, Italy, France, Germany, USA, Japan (in 2009 in Kyoto and Tokyo), and Lebanon. Since 2014 she has been teaching in the frame of the training program "The World Is Sound" in close collaboration with Alessio Castellacci. In 2008/09 she taught contemporary dance technique and in 2007/08 individual courses at the Pre-School Educatiοn and Grammar School Ljubljana. She occasionally also gives voice and movement workshops to the students of the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television in Ljubljana.

In 2004 she was the recipient of the DanceWeb scholarship at the international ImPulsTanz Festival in Vienna, where in 2018 she also ran a “moved by voice” workshop. In 2007 she was admitted to the five-week programme Atelier Jerzy Grotowski and continued to attend intensive training courses at the Grotowski Institute until 2011. She ran a “moved by voice” workshop there as well, in 2012, when she was also invited to show her performance “The Taste of Silence Always Resonates”.