Soft to the Touch: Performance, Vulnerability, and Entanglement in the Time of Covid

Jennifer Torrence

What is the nature of human touch and human contact in contemporary music performance, both in general and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic? In a time when bodies must be kept at several meters distance, what comes of works which explicitly call for closeness, physical contact, and sharing? How might these works be interpreted differently in light of the COVID-19 pandemic? Percussionist and performer Jennifer Torrence reflects on the impact of the pandemic on her artistic practice and on her research as part of the project entitled Performing Precarity, which seeks to explore the inherent risks in performance when musicians and audiences are entangled in codependent structures. In light of COVID-19, this exposition attempts to unfold and trace modes of vulnerability in contemporary music performance—from human contact via eye contact and physical touch, to the precarious negotiation of shared space—and to reflect on how such encounters might breed new understandings and knowledge.

Performing Precarity

Norwegian Academy of Music

Project Leader, Ellen Ugelvik

Project Group, Ellen Ugelvik, Jennifer Torrence and Laurence Crane

PhD candidate, Lisa Streich

Resource Group, Anders Førisdal and Philip Thomas

Project period: 2019 - 2023

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 increasingly finds herself unable to keep a sense of mastery over the performance. In other words, performing is increasingly precarious.

Performing Precarity (PP) investigates this new paradigm by abandoning notions of mastery and instrument-specificity in favour of the idea of the network and its ensuing precarity: What kinds of practices emerge when traditional conceptions of beauty and perfection are relinquished in favour of precarity, fragility, risk, instability, failure, and mutual dependence between performers, composers, technologies, and audiences? What kinds of reflections will emerge out of this repositioning of the performer from “master” to a mutually dependent agent in such a network?

Applied by Heyde to describe the mechanics of instruments, the notion of the network suggests new ways of thinking about the interdependencies of musical performance. Unlike the solid conception of instrumental identity implied by the notion of idiomaticity, that of the network suggests a relational conception of performance practice which embraces and potentially affects all aspects of musical performance, highlighting a wholly different set of performative qualities – interdependence, fragility, unpredictability, risk. We should like to pursue such qualities guided by an ethical performativity founded upon precarity. Being constantly exposed to the risks of performative collapse or failure, and to dependency on others or on technology, the performer embracing this must also surrender to these hazards, ultimately risking transforming their very conception of self.

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