The works in Container Three manifest in contexts that are, or aspire to be, witnessed by larger audiences. The relationships exposed here are built in the creative performative act, my body is sounding and moving in erratic and erotic ways as I test out and learn how this kind of expression can manifest alongside other performers and under what creative conditions. In some instances, I am sharing my way of inhabiting the creative world of the erratic or erotic. In others, I am inviting performers in to try out inhabiting that creative world with me. There are six instances of practice included here: three duo collaborative performances and three group works.
The first two examples: Sun Infusion and a softer sound an earthquake have similar intention and function but different execution. In Sun Infusion I collaborate with my husband, Tim, tapping into a loving and safe relationship that helps contain the insecurity and challenges of facing a live audience in the flesh in a more typical setup of a live gig. With Feronia in assae, I build trust over time after many hours of playing together, taking risks together and being vulnerable with each other in our sonic encounters. In these works objects are absent but many elements associated with live performance often found in the background like physical tension, light or our location in space remain present and amplified.
These contexts helped me sense my own erotic power from within and understand how to put others in contact with it - how to withstand and share something so intimate and physical expressed through my female body in close detail. These are the first performances I make in a more traditional stage setup after a break of 10 years from singing in those kinds of contexts. I choose to reflect on these works in more poetic ways than the rest of the portfolio using informal language and video collage to build on the intimacy inherent in them.
In Experimental Karaoke Juice Machine I foreground the sonic, drafting a performance setup in which my body and voice are only attuning to pre-recorded sounds that several collaborators sent to me to play back. This work shows how the absence of sharing risk with others can lead to an over-threshold performance that directly impacts expression. I question here why the acousmatic, the disembodied recorded sound as well as a virtual audience are not enough to reward and support my erratic body and what costs these over-threshold performances can incur.
The two group workshops in this container - the Splendor micro-residency and the Embodied Improvisation Research Workshop done at Concordia University in Montreal - experiment with creative group dynamics in ways that feel accessible to me. Groups have always been difficult contexts for my body to relax into because of the compound power a multiplicity of bodies has to suck me out of myself and into each of them, scrambling to make sense of others' needs as I am working hard to decipher what happens in-between all of us in contexts that are endlessly changing. I find it difficult to trust that others have my best interests at heart and that my kind of expression won't be too much/too little or causing harm through its excesses to me or them. I was determined to test out some strategies that would bring more ease, joy, play and pleasure to group work, helping me ease some of the tensions these dynamics bring and see what new creative horizons could open up.
In the Splendor residency I borrow exercises from Roy Hart, Action Theatre and the work I did with Persis Jadé Maravela on the DRIFT to define a shared expressive space with three other contemporary musicians, building relations that are based on the sonic as sound moves through our physical bodies and space.
At Concordia I work with four other performers, two coming from a theatre/movement background and two from contemporary music, defining a more diffuse space of co-making, one that is emergent in the encounter and is co-led by a few of us. I invited people into this shared space after having at least one separate one to one encounter with them. In those encounters we tested out our collaboration, bringing our performative sensibilities into contact with each other.
I did many more one to one collaboration tests with other people than just the four that made it into the Concordia research workshop. These other one to ones informed the development of my own sonic sensing workshop - an approach I include here in continuation of the sonic drifting work I did before.
The last work in this container, between you and me, is the most ambitious work in this portfolio, at least in terms of its predetermined performance settings and schedule: four countries and three international music festivals. My long-term collaborator Christine Cornwell and I accept to open our intimate creative process to contemporary music ensemble Nadar, learning how to include newcomers into it.
