Watch the Audience Feedback Video:
Birdsong tells a tale through the lens of the artist whose voice is stifled in the everyday humdrum of survival. Learning to dream again often begins with the bold remembering of our creative birthright. In daring to sing aloud, we call onto others who are searching for a place to belong, to arrive home again.
Through the deliberate use of aleatoric vocals and sensorial stimulation, this film confronts the tension and limits of both freedom and captivity that the human experience can hold at once.
Birdsong echoes a lamentation of oppression but also redemption – an ode to all who ever wandered and felt lost; but never gave up on their own humanity in the face of giants.
Director Biography – Claudine Liang
Claudine Liang is a Singapore-based performing artist who believes in the synergistic potential of movement and psychology to create spaces and possibilities for conversations surrounding social justice and mental wellness.
Her maturity and intuitive nature as an artist, creator and educator nurtured over more than 10 years of global industry experience, now serves her in her own journey of emerging as an artistic director of her own brand. Armed with a passion and a relentless curiousity about new ways of learning and being, Claudine wrote and taught her own movement workshops inspired by contemporary dance, somatic schools of thought and positive psychology principles during the pandemic, as a way to find more connection within the self, and in turn, to others.
Her personal philosophy is that the strength of the artist lies not in the power to create, but the humility to let art flow through them and into the world. It is Claudine’s firm belief that a rooted intentionality in the ways we question and respond to our environment hold the keys to a life well lived.
Director Statement
Inspired by research on birds in captivity whose lifespan vastly outlive birds in the wild, the film questions the existential choices of what it means to be human and be free. And in the discomfort of identifying with being held captive, the audience is compelled to confront their own decisions to stay or to change. The film is also made for people who struggle with their relationship with mental health from being marginalised or othered daily – it is my hope that more awareness and sensitivity be nurtured in the world so that we can become a more human race.
Experimental Film & Music Video Festival 
