Solo Performances

In her A Cappella acoustic songs, Laura Totenhagen creates compositions to texts developed in collaboration with Australian writer and musician Ursula Martyn-Ellis since 2020. Totenhagen fills the space entirely with her voice, and nothing feels lacking. As is well known, creating something simple is the hardest thing one can do, and this principle is central to the motivation behind this program. It is defined by the absence of safety nets or hidden layers, relying solely on the A Cappella setting, Totenhagen's vocal skill, and her storytelling. Depending on the line she sings, Totenhagen alters the timbre of a word, bringing to life the delicate texts of Ursula Martyn-Ellis. With a bold yet natural stage presence, she invites the audience into her virtuosic world.

Through repetition, vocal technique and movement, Laura takes words and melodies, breaks them down and examines them. She complicates the meaning of a saccharine lyric by placing stress on different words; repeats a platitude until it becomes more of a disembodied sound than a meaningful message. Through her bravura lyrical interpretation, she embodies the monstrous feminine on the receiving end of a relationship miscommunication, like Diamanda Galas singing a response track to a gaslighting ex, or an all-encompassing sexist society. In this mode, Laura is enigmatic and controlled: her body, voice, and words are sometimes in unison, sometimes conflicting, but her performance is consistently engrossing.

Laura Totenhagen commands a range that spans from the most delicate vocal techniques to raw noise textures, transforming her voice with digital effect pedals into an entirely new, synthetically charged instrument. In doing so, she alienates the effects themselves, freeing them from their intended function and pushing them into extreme territories.

Totenhagen’s solo set evokes the nuanced scenery of a horror film: dark, threatening, sometimes grotesque—a cabinet of horrors that is simultaneously infused with humor, playfulness, and lightness. It is the solo performance of a singular artist who invites the audience into an acoustic chamber of horrors and takes them by the hand—both uncanny and liberating.

In this maximalist approach to the voice, Totenhagen reveals herself as an uncompromising sound researcher, unconcerned with formats or rules, and constantly striving for new metamorphoses.