Soft Tongues: A Bioacoustic Opera

The tongue of the frog is of the softest known biological materials on this planet. It is this softness that yields the stickiness needed to pluck a fly from mid air, slough skin in perpetual acts of self-consumption, and stretch voice in promulgating chorusing networks. Joined by bioacousticians, Jami's field recorder, and an amphibious choir, Soft tongues invites full swamp submersion as a small audience listens episodically through the shapeshifting life (and afterlife) cycle of the frog. The forty-five minute performance moves between solo singing, monolog, field recordings, choral singing, dance, and video projection in an interdisciplinary outgrowth of a 2022 bioacoustic field residency undertaken in collaboration with the Amphibian Natural History Lab at the University of Campinas, Brazil. Soft tongues interrogates the relational, adhesive, and compounding qualities of voice, and the listening that tethers it.