Performing Precarity
(2024)
author(s): Laurence Crane, Anders Førisdal, LEA Ye Gyoung, Io A. Sivertsen, Lisa Streich, Jennifer Torrence and Ellen Ugelvik
published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
To be a contemporary music performer today is to have a deeply fragmented practice. The performer’s role is no longer simply a matter of mastering her instrument and executing a score. Music practices are increasingly incorporating new instruments and technologies, methods of creating works, audience interaction and situations of interdependence between performer subjects. The performer finds herself unable to keep a sense of mastery over the performance. In other words, performing is increasingly precarious.
Performance as Device for Disorientation
(2024)
author(s): Jennifer Torrence
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
By its very nature, performance is precarious—there is always the chance that everything might fall apart. In an attempt to mitigate the discomfort of this unpredictability, many musicians develop strategies in the hope of holding the reins on the proverbial cart. But what if one chose not to maintain control and instead embraced the wild nature inherent to performance? What kinds of knowledge and aesthetic experiences might emerge in the inevitable moments of collapse? Drawing on her recent research in the project Performing Precarity, an extended collaboration with composer Simon Løffler, as well as concepts by Jack Halberstam and Sara Ahmed, percussionist/performer Jennifer Torrence meditates on the notion of performance as a device for disorientation—that is, performance as an embodied practice of rupture, of getting lost, and of undoing the order of things.
