Pouncing Tiger: Paulette Nardal is a sound performance situated between archival material, live music, and poetic fiction. It draws on interviews with Paulette Nardal from the Nardal sound archive of her biographer, author of Fiertés de femme noire: Entretiens / Mémoires de Paulette Nardal (2019), Philippe Grollemund. 

The performance unfolds as a fictional conversation with Paulette Nardal. Fragments of her interviews intersect with electronic soundscapes, improvised music, and poetry. Nardal’s voice remains present throughout, entering into dialogue with other voices and perspectives. The sonic experience becomes a space in which the archive, the performance, and the audience all participate equally in the production. At the core of the work is sampling: voices, breaths, pauses, and fragments of speech are detached from their original contexts and reconfigured into new sonic and rhythmic relationships. The sampling is performed live using an SP-404MKII and is complemented by field recordings, synthesizers, and improvisations with flute and voice.