For some time now, I have been moving away from wholly notated scores, and moving more into the realm of graphic scores and instructions or directives for improvisations.
The Joy of Loss continues along this path, but now deploys text as the sole means for live performers to explore the environment of their own emotional experience as they present their experience in sound, and - in the case of another performative element – in dance and movement.
It is an improvisation, it is structured, it is embedded within the group dynamic, it approaches what Ornette Coleman sought to do – to “play pure emotion”. At the same time, it is liberation from the constraints of pulse and from linear and horizontal organisation and development, and embodies something of singular moment or proto-gesture…it is also potentially emancipation from instruments and a traditional music education too. Of course, all of these come to bear, but they do not drive.
Whilst there is a meta-structure present in an audible and infrasonic complement (the eight-channel surround sound installation that occupies the same space and time), the improvisational drivers are excerpts from literature.
In one case, it is a whole poem…
These words resonate within me. Some of these words I have known for a long time – some have come to me just recently, simply because perhaps only now I am ready to hear them, consider them, understand something of them, embrace them and allow them their own space.
There are five sections in the eight-channel installation, and these sections correspond to five texts that speak to me in very different ways. These words will appear in their own blog entries in the near future.
But in performance they appear as an improvisational stimulant for the performers to reach inwards and share outwards…
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