HA - GMEM — National Center for Musical Creation in Marseille

As part of the Actoral Festival.

She walks onto the stage empty-handed. Around her: the stage, the audience—nothing more. And suddenly: HA! A recipient of the 2025 International Bursary Award, among other honors, Jana Jacuka explores the performativity of laughter as an escape. “A friend of a friend put his arm around me—ha—I felt unsafe, but I just went ‘hahahaha.’”

In HA, Jana Jacuka transforms the voice into a choreographic territory where the body ceaselessly seeks another way to speak. High-pitched sounds, grunts, inhaled breaths, distorted screams: she expels sounds from her body through extreme vocal techniques. Each sound becomes a gesture, each vibration an attempt to escape the conventions of language. Behind this vocal virtuosity, a more intimate question also emerges—laughter ceases to be a form of politeness and becomes an act of resistance.