Kinga Ötvös is a shapeshifter and voice acrobat based in Berlin. With degrees in academic vocal and acting studies, their art lies at the confluence of different territories such as music, theatre, drag, and performance art.
You come from Romania but have Hungarian roots. How has this bilingual, bicultural background influenced you?
I love being bilingual and bicultural—or maybe fluid-cultural. It makes me very flexible, I think. I identify with multiple cultures, music, and languages. Hungarian is a very metaphorical language, unrelated to any others, while Romanian is Latin-based, which makes it easier for me to relate to Italian, Spanish, and French.
One thing that comes with this is a feeling of non-belonging. Some might see that as a loss, but I actually like it. It detaches me from the idea of owning land and gives me a different sense of freedom.
I like playing around with both Romanian and Hungarian musical influences, which can be very different from each other. I also love performing as a drag quing, and sometimes I tap into macho/patriarchal characters, allowing myself to be influenced by both sides—for example, Legényes, a solo men’s folk dance from Transylvanian Hungarians, and Manele, an urban Romanian ethno-pop genre that blends local traditional music with Romani, Balkan, and Middle Eastern influences.
Your voice is an important instrument in your work, and you’ve also undergone classical singing studies. In your musical works, your voice mutates and shifts, never staying the same even within a single track. Can you talk about how you work with voice?
On one hand, I enjoy stretching my voice within the frame of my physical abilities, pushing the limits of my own body. I was trained as a classical opera singer, and even bel canto was very cyber-like for its time: it was designed to make the voice as loud as possible, working with the acoustic properties of the space.
From there, I became interested in stretching the limits further, digitally—like pitch-bending my voice. It’s fascinating how much transformation is possible once you take the sound waves of your voice and transform them into electric currents. You can become different characters in the story of your tracks.
And I think characters is a keyword here: I approach my voice with curiosity about what kind of person or character it can become, whether I’m working with vocal effects or using my raw voice. The vocal melodies in my tracks carry layers of emotional information and stories. The voice itself is a powerful vehicle for storing information that people process unconsciously, instantly.
Performance is also an important element in how you present your work—it draws from theatre and performance art as such. Can you talk about the performative aspects of your work?
I studied acting and worked as an actor in a state theatre for quite some time, playing text-based and singing roles, and often being part of performance pieces, dance pieces, and more.
I’ve never really separated these fields. I’d put it like this: I have a body—that’s my instrument. And this instrument can learn all kinds of things: different dances, movement techniques, improvisation methods, types of stage presence, ways of singing, texts, dialogues—the list is endless.
From this perspective, I’ve always just been playing my instrument—myself. That hasn’t changed. What changes are the labels I navigate through, because society tends to use these labels to separate disciplines.
For me, there’s a whole system—composed of performance, music, and visual elements. This machinery creates the performance, the music, the opera, the experience— call it whatever you want. There is a performative element even in the recorded tracks of my album—you just can’t see it, but it exists in the field of information that the music transmits and carries.
What are your inspirations?
Marine biology, quantum physics, astrophysics, martial arts, 10m air pistol shooting, the human body, the Schumann resonance, cats, blue whales, the ocean, and death.
Would you say that you prefer working on conceptual pieces, or does the interactive / improvisational element in performing also influence you?
I think the conceptual element is always there, but it doesn’t necessarily start that way, nor would I define it as a conceptual piece. It’s usually very abstract and hard to tame. I use improvisation to create the material, then I fix it by recording and producing it. After that, I perform it—always leaving room for improvisation. Sometimes, I skip the production phase entirely, just creating certain elements that I can mix and play with during a live show.
But it can also unfold completely differently. Whenever I start working on new music material or rehearsing my live set, I approach it as if it’s the first time I’m doing it, allowing new approaches to surface. Or I might sneak in a new instrument/effect just out of curiosity.
Interactivity happens naturally in live performance. Eye contact or an energy exchange is the type of interaction I seek. I see it as a shared process, where both the audience and I are actively moving each other.
What is the interconnection between music and sound in your performances? How do you create your music?
I think I’ve touched on this question a bit in each answer. What I would add is that I perceive sound as music. I simply charge sounds with dramatic and emotional content. Sometimes, I feel that just by repeating a dialogue a few times, it transforms into music.
What are you currently working on?
I’m finishing up my next album. I don’t have a title yet, but hopefully, it will be out soon. It will contain some of the songs I perform live, as well as some crazy trips that can never be performed live. I’m very excited about it.
Interview Lucia Udvardyova
Photo Toth Eszter Emese