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Multi-Space was an installation in Flói, a large open area in Harpa, Reykjavík’s most prominent cultural center in the heart of the city.1 Designed by renowned artist Ólafur Eliasson and architect Henning Larsen, Harpa’s façade consists of overlaying geometrical constructions of steel and glass (reflecting natural light during the day, and constantly changing color during the night), while the ceiling of the large hallway inside is completely made of mirrors. As a counterpart to this ceiling, Multi-Space resembled a sea of mirrors to walk through, visually connected by glass walls to the actual sea and harbor outside.
Multi-Space was an exploration to test, subvert and re-experience the overlapping boundaries of performance space. The 125 mirrors reminded us of the multiple angles, perspectives, and boundaries that we constantly reconstruct ourselves.2 You never see the actual mirrors: it connects your eyes to different spots across the space, while the mirror itself as an object stays invisible – just like the ungraspable and fluid nature of performance space. By navigating through this sea of mirrors, audiences were invited to move around and create the boundaries of performance space themselves. Just like the boats and animals in Harpa’s surrounding seas, Multi-Space therefore navigated through known and unknown places, to explore our connection with the world around us. I joined the audiences in this navigation journey in three performances.
When the audience entered, I stood blindfolded in the middle of the room as object on display, with my violin and bow in my hand: no sound, no movement, only standing. I could hear the audience, but my visual space was taken away. Meanwhile, the audiences could a recording, projected in the room, consisting of my voice and violin sounds. The voice was raising the main questions of ‘where am I’ and ‘where are you’, while playing around sets of words that connected with different senses and movement: Here/Hear, Sea/See, Round/Around. The violin sounds focused on overtones: by playing an open D-string softly and close to the bridge, many overtones sounded within that D. By changing the speed of the bow and the bow pressure, the overtones alternated each other, almost uncontrollable. This sound world resembled the concept of multi-space: a sound is never a single pitch, but consists of many overlapping overtones embedded within that pitch – and when activating these overtones more clearly, one becomes aware of them.
After I picked up the violin, I pretended to play yet did not make any sound. I had a compact, waterproof GoPro action camera attached to my violin. With the GoPro images streamed in real time on a wall in Flói, the violin got ‘eyes’ – while my visual space was still taken away by the blindfold. At some point, I started producing sounds on my instrument, that were resembling the concept of multi-space in another way. I played a unison double stop, again a D (one note as open string, the other as stopped note on the G-string), and added my voice sounding D as well. However, the pitch of every sound layer changed constantly and ever so slightly, by slowly moving up and down around D, thereby creating specific beating patterns. These overlapping notes initially seemed to be the same D (just like a room seems to be one singular space), but by moving the different layers away from each other, these differences become more apparent.
After taking off the blindfold, I walked around the room in growing circles, filming the mirrors, the audience, my own projection, the surrounding harbor through the glass walls. With the GoPro camera on my violin still projected in real time on a big wall, the surrounding harbor was drawn inside. Then, I left the room, returning later at the other side of the glass wall, to look back in from the outside. In the first two performances, I then continued my walk into the city center to enter a clothing shop of 66° North.3 There, I positioned myself as mannequin in the window – again blindfolded, as object to watch. In the third performance, I had to cross a bigger part of Harpa to go outside, left my violin on the ground in the main hall, and ended my performance behind the glass wall of the installation area.
Performer, sound design, curator: Stijn Brinkman
Camera: Skjáskot
Mirrors: Góði Hirðirinn, Listaháskóli Íslands, Gamla Bíó, Dansverkstæðið, Borgarleikhúsið and many other mirror owners
Thanks to: Angela Rawlings, Neus Fuster Corral, Bergþóra Ægisdóttir, Simon Schultz, Camilla Cerioni, Santiago Rueda García, Nils Marten Steinacker, Listaháskóli Íslands
OVERVIEW:
- 22 January 2023, Harpa (Flói), Reykjavík, Iceland
- Open installation 11:00 – 20:00
- Three performances: 12:00, 15:30 and 18:30
- Performance duration: around 25 minutes
- Audience: 20-40 people per performance
Eye Power was a performance to ‘erase’ the eyes of a performer: by lowering the agency of the performer (both me and the violin) in constructing the performance, the agency of the surroundings and audience as co-players became stronger. The performance happened in the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague, in cultural center Amare, for fellow music students and a teacher.4
The floor was covered with 7 large mirrors. When the audience entered, I stood in the middle of the room with my violin and bow in my hand, blindfolded just as in Multi-Space. Again here I did not make any sound while pretending to play. Differently from Multi-Space, however, I continued performing soundless throughout the whole performance. My intention was to play with the audience’s expectations for the concert, turning a violin performance that was expectedly acoustical into a solely visual, physical performance.
After the pretended playing in silence, I took off the blindfold and looked straight at the eyes of every audience member, directly or through the mirror reflections. The role of the violin transformed from an expected sounding instrument into an object as protagonist on its own, especially when I had put it down on the floor and joined the audience to watch it (as if it was going to play by itself), and when I placed the violin and bow on different mirrors around the room.
Just before the end, I narrowed the visual space to a wall socket, by creating a square around the socket with duct tape, framing the socket as if it was an art piece. Then I went away, out of the room to a different floor in the building, not returning for 15 minutes. Since I erased myself from the room, the audience members were left alone with nothing else to watch than themselves and the surroundings, visually transforming themselves from audience to main performers. According to a group evaluation afterwards, they didn’t wait in silence for me to return: they decided as group, two minutes after I had left the room, that the performance had ended.
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OVERVIEW:
- 8 June 2022, Amare (Studio 6), The Hague, The Netherlands
- Performance duration: 17 minutes
- Performer: Stijn Brinkman
- Audience: 5 people
Done exploring around?
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OVERVIEW:
- 3 December 2022 in Kaffi Hólar, Hólar, Iceland
- Performance duration: 10-15 minutes
- Performers: Bergþóra Ægisdóttir (voice) and Stijn Brinkman (violin)
- Audience: 14 people
The score of OVERLAPS for the second duo: side B (right) should be visible, side A (left) should be folded to the backside © Stijn Brinkman
The score of OVERLAPS for the first duo: side A (left) should be visible, side B (right) should be folded to the backside © Stijn Brinkman
Out There was a performance in Kaffi Hólar, a restaurant and the touristic reception of Hólar, a small university village in the north of Iceland with importance to Iceland’s religious history.5 The audience was facing big windows in the restaurant, overlooking the fields and mountains around Hólar. I invited the audience to look out, to follow the movement of the fog over the frozen fields, to see how the fog sometimes covered the mountain, while sometimes the mountain would claim appearance again. I had brought two binoculars to share around, using them carefully as extension of their own eyes, to zoom in and out through the misty surroundings. I invited them to ‘look at what’s out there’.
While the audience was extending the boundaries of their visual space to involve the space outside the restaurant, I left the room with my violin case, walked in front of the windows so that they could see me through the windows as I slowly disappeared into the fields. After a minute, mezzo soprano Bergþóra started a recording of different violin layers, that were resembling multi-space in Out There: the layers started all on the same pitch as if they were one, moved slowly away from each other upon dissolving.
When the recording stopped, Bergþóra invited the audience to open the windows and to ´listen to what´s out there´. When I arrived on a spot in the field, I unpacked my violin and started playing – inspired by the mountains around me while the fog cleared away – quite loudly, so the audience would hear faint sounds coming from far. Some of them could zoom in to me with the binoculars, while I stayed invisible to the bare eyes of others.
Bergþóra took binoculars, zoomed in to me, and started singing a ‘duet from afar’ with me, based on what she saw (my movements, within the fog, field and mountains) as graphical score. Since she was in the room of the audience, she sang as soft and little as possible to be able to hear me.
After 2,5 minutes, I stopped playing and packed my violin. Bergþóra also stopped singing and invited the audience to go out themselves and to ‘explore what’s out there’ – only if they wanted, they still had their own agency to do whatever they felt like. The performance had no clear ending: I kept walking through the fields for a while, the audience dissolved into different places or stayed behind and continued with their day.
OVERLAPS is the title of a graphical score that I composed for two duos with an instrumentation that is both specific and open: each duo should consist of a singer and wind instrumentalist. With this instrumentation, the sounds will blend together – partly because the production of sound is for both the voice and the wind instruments based on breathing.
My graphical score is inspired on ideas on multi-space in traditional and outdoor performance venues. Side A creatively represents a traditional indoor performance venue, with all spatial layers, visual lines, lines of co-presence and imaginative spaces within and around. Side B creatively and minimally represents an outdoor performance, with layers of the horizon, passing people (who not intend to ‘be’ audience but still witness the action), and the difficulty of drawing boundaries.
The two duos play the score at the same time, in separate rooms yet audible to each other. The first duo is playing in the room where the audience is, the second duo is in a separate room, all by themselves. One duo starts with side A of the score, and after 2-3 minutes (in their own relative feeling of time), continues with side B, also for 2-3 minutes. The other duo does that in reverse order. Although both duos play a different side of the score, the words on both scores coincide: side A (first duo) and side B (second duo) contain the words ‘zoom in/out: who? what?’, side B (first duo) and side A (second duo) contain the words ‘navigate: who? what?’.
While thinking about my intended outcome of the score, I saw music as intangible material with different layers, just as multi-space – while all performers are navigating inside that material.
OVERVIEW:
- 7 December 2022 in Mengi, Reykjavík, Iceland6
- Performance duration: 5 minutes
- Performers:
- First duo: Bergþóra Ægisdóttir (voice), Bergþóra Kristbergsdóttir (clarinet)
- Second duo: Linnéa Falck (voice), Karl Tipp (saxophone)
- Audience: 12 people
Done exploring around?
Check PART 3: Walls and bodies and PART 4: Move, move, move: zoom and navigate
