Research Catalogue

The performer’s perspective and the impact of collaboration on the performer’s artistic practice is often overlooked in frameworks designed to analyze collaboration in contemporary music. The conception of what a performer is ‘for’ in the development of a new musical piece is, at least in part, what constitutes a performer’s artistic practice, whether that is the performer as an interpreter and executor of scores, as an adviser to the composer, and/or as a co-creating deviser. The interpreter-adviser-deviser model is conceived as a framework for considering the ways composer-performer collaborations can influence and contribute to the construction of a performer’s artistic practice and subjectivity. Collaboration is not only a method of creating new works, it's also a method for creating artistic practices. Drawing on examples of devised practices as exhibited in Jennifer Torrence’s artistic research, practices which are communicated through reflections, dialogues, images, and videos, the article ultimately argues that it is the performer as deviser that offers the most radical rethinking of the purpose, role, and potential of the performer in contemporary music collaboration.

Layered, scattered and synthetic traces of a performer’s authorship. A series of harmonic partials. Materials include photographs, audio recordings and writings sourced from performances the author participated in between 2013 – 2017. 1. Audio File: Sydney, Warsaw, Berkeley, 2016 Sydney Biennale: Adrian Heathfield/Ghost Telephone, 2016 Warsaw Museum of Modern Art: Boris Charmatz/Expo Zero, 2016 Death of the Documenter: Family Home, 2016 2. Photos (Zan Wimberly) of Sydney Biennale 3. Photos (Chrysa Parkinson) of Warsaw Museum of Modern Art and Family Home 4. Audio File: 7 Questions (4 voice recording), 2016-2017 with embedded questions from: Ilse, Louise, Klara, Yari, Adam, Kim, Hanah, Andreas. 5. Essay with Audio: Liminal Animates, Chrysa Parkinson 2013-2018 6. Audio file: The Glitch, Chrysa Parkinson 2015

Free improvised music allows me as a musician to be able to change direction at any time. Free improvised music is the only form of music where I can completely change my way of playing depending on the character of the room or the space. The room becomes a co-player that I can either go along with or resist. In my project I investigate different ways to explore and clarify how changes of direction in free improvisation can be performed and how the spatial conditions and other conditions affect the way the music is played. The form of improvised music I am examining is extremely dialogue-oriented, where action and reaction within the dialogue in the room play a vital role in the process. What I would like to try out and demonstrate is how a sonic language entirely based on the participants’ sensitivity can be moulded, i.e. a language that is altogether based on the listening and playing of a person in a particular space. The sounding image process that becomes a link to the narrative text. Through the use of sound, text and image, and all their mixed forms, and drawing from my experiences as a musician and composer, I hope it will be possible for you to follow this twisty way toward something.

The language of art is often poetic and abstract. Reduced and lawless in terms of grammar. I experience the poetic and abstract language as closer to the experienced world than the more concrete and descriptive language that is the norm in the majority of formulations in society. In my artistic practice at the moment, I work with color, movement and time. In the video medium. To say that art is a language is also an assertion, or a worn metaphor. We have no written language rules we agree upon in the arts, no defined alphabet. And maybe that's exactly what the making of art is? Creating form, while challenging form? Being the practitioner, and in that sense defining, in a landscape of concrete and abstract, in definite and indefinite and fluid and solid. To create while shaping the form of it, is something else than performing within a given formation. This contribution to a digital catalogue for artistic research are selections of my work, and thoughts, related to it translated into pieces of texts. Some pieces of text along with some video pieces as well as a print from a video, a so-called 'still'. They are selected to function in different constellations, and for several reasons. A collage as a method and a way to relate to my own work, and with the selection, emphasizes the content of the texts. I apply my own thesis discussed in the text upon my contribution 'here' *. My contribution appears in Vis – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research. The digital is representation. It is not. It is equally important to me that this contributed in form acknowledges that making a presence in an internet-based database is not without hyperlinks. It appears because the other is. * Where is 'here', what is 'here'? (Video and video with sound.) The visual material in this exposition is from the videos 'La ditt liv vitne'(2017), 'Essay on Colour'(2017) and Perceptual Cycle (2016). By Anne Marthe Dyvi.

Lemur spelar, skaper og kuraterer. Ensemblet arbeider som ein firehoda kropp, ei eining sett saman av sterke individ med eigne ambisjonar og agendaer, samstundes som alle har eit sterkt fokus på kreative gruppeprosessar. Lemuria er vårt fjerde verk i ein serie av prosjekt der titlar, konsept og strategiar frå det 20. århundre sin kunstmusikalske kanon blir omforma og gjenbrukt, i vårt bilde. Verket er ein konsertinstallasjon for ensemble, to songarar og live elektronikk, framført i ein spredt scenografi, for eit mobilt publikum. Verket vart bestilt av Borealisfestivalen og urframført i Grand Selskapslokaler i Bergen, 10.mars 2017.

1 place 33 rooms “Memory, including collective memory, is linked to houses. When we eradicate a place in the exterior world, we lose a major pathway into our own history.” Lena Lindgren, Morgenbladet, 2. November 2012 The project is based on a real place, a house in Oslo. I am interested in how our memory connects with places and houses, in expanding our understanding of what a house and a place are, seen from the perspective of our own cultural background, time and history – and in the perceptions and experiences that are associated with it. In the significance of how the rooms are organised in relation to each other and what happens if the room is freed from the context in which it stands. It is rare to experience an isolated room that doesn’t relate to anything else, torn from its place, time and spatial context. The neutral room simply doesn’t exist. A key aspect of architecture is the experience of going from one room to another. The way the rooms are organised in relation to each other affects the sense of what it is like to be in the house. From the starting point that architecture begins with a single room, I have explored what criteria a space has to fulfil to be called a room and how big it has to be. Everyone relates to rooms – whether it is a private room like a bedroom, kitchen, dining room, or a public space such as a café, library or railway station. The work comprises six physical installations, plus the book and archive “33 fortellinger” (33 stories).

Stacey Sacks is a PhD candidate in Performing Arts at Stockholm’s University of the Arts. Her Doctoral Project *This Untethered Buffoon or the Trickster in Everything* takes form as a suite of hyper-disciplinary experiments with mask, clown, stop-motion animation, film, photography, sculpture, text, drawing and performance. Drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of ‘critical intimacy’ the performance-essay 'luxurious migrant' reflects on whiteness and privilege and the performance of it. As an intra-cultural, auto-ethnographic excavation it attempts and possibly fails to critically engage with notions of access, authority and power from within the cultural canon. As such it is a creative experimentation with theory and performance, an exploration of the improvisatory impulse and what it means to be ‘on’ the moment. Since clown naturally contains transgressive elements, the project explores how the genre can be used in a neo-colonial context to subvert or interrupt the dominant discourse, whether satire and parody function as activism and if it is in fact possible to push back white supremacy through critical engagement and play, starting with a robust self-critique.

In my work I experiment with interventional urban commons, through practices of altering and re-purposing existing structures. The work is both informal and transgressive in its methodology, with the core intention to investigate and participate in the shaping and making of the social city. Art and research can provide keys to accessing such a city in the making; a space where we can challenge the preconceptions of what is possible, and to imagine alternative strategies for the creation of realities. This article presents a theoretical frame work together with a number of strategies practiced under the Lefebvrian concept of the ‘Right to the City.’