Shout #1–3 - Monika Dalach

Shout is the title of a song by British band Tears for Fears, published in the UK on 23 November 1984 and considered by many to be one of the most recognisable songs of the 1980s. It is a strong memory from my own early childhood, the 1980s pop culture and the growing Polish interest in MTV. In the early 1990s, Shout, and more generally the characteristic timbre of synthesizers, percussion and electric guitars, was ubiquitous in my family home. With time, the song gained a personal status for me, becoming a bridge between the past and the present, a vehicle transmitting childhood memories, like the madeleine from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. A quarter of a century after its premiere, the song became recognisable again thanks to the MTS series Skins, proving its timeless, universal character. 

My cycle Shout is a hybrid of electroacoustic music, gesture theatre, and audiovisual show, with musical influences from 1980s entertainment music. It is an exploration and antiexploration of shout, rooted in primal scream therapy against phobia and anxiety, a method used notably by John Lennon, which inspired Roland Orzabal and Ian Stanley from the Tears for Fears band to write Shout. It is a study of tensions, both obvious and deeply hidden, embodied, hushed down and amplified, visible on our faces and bodies, in motion and stillness, then and now.