5. SIGNIFICANT OTHERS

In this section I have included a collection of significant others, important influences on the work and approach outlined in this research. Significant others are described as “supportive personal, professional and social relations with people” (Smilde 86). I extend this to also include phenomena, movements and groups or collectives engaged in particular practices.I have deliberately mixed academic with non-academic influences within the same category, and presented them in alphabetical order, to highlight their equal importance in my frame of reference and course of study.

5.1 Akarova (Acarin, Marguerite)
5.2 Dance your Dissertation 
5.3 Folk Dancing 
5.3.1 Contra Dance 
5.3.2 Faroese Chain Dance 
5.4 Gava, Amalia – My Maternal Grandmother and her Handcraft Practice 
5.5 Joik (Sami Vocal Practice) 
5.6 Knitters/Spinners, contemporary communities 
5.7 Monk, Meredith 
5.8 Music Theatre (Goebbels, Kagel, et al.) 
5.9 Peers, mine 
5.10 Walshe, Jennifer and the “New Discipline” 
5.11 Yoga Music (live) 

5.1 Akarova (Acarin, Marguerite)

Akarova (Marguerite Acarin) was a Belgian dancer, singer, choreographer and artist born in 1904 in Brussels. Her performances mixed costume and stage design with music and movement, and she was a classically trained singer and dancer who studied Dalcroze's eurythmics system of embodiment of musical gesture. Her work became known as “music architecture”, “living geometry” and “pure plastics”; “Akarova accorded primary place to the materials, construction and organization of avant-garde aesthetics”, where “the importance of lighting, design, space, audience experience, political content and overall synthesis took precedence over any authority previously held by the dramatic text or conventions of theatre” (Andrews 27-30). There is no known existing footage of her dancing onstage during her most prolific period, in post World War I Belgium, therefore all accounts of her dance process are drawn either from archival photographs, or from interviews with Akarova herself, her colleagues or spectators. She described the relationship of dance to music in her work as fluid, that both media would be changing and informing each other even in performance, without one taking precedence or remaining static. This would be especially true in cases where the music had not been finalized or recorded yet - she would often ask composers to make changes and revisions in the music and likewise she would change her movements or improvise sections in performance. She designed and sewed all her own costumes and did her own lighting and stage design, and her choreography was said to “emphasize the musical structure that exists in sound waves between the stage and the audience” (Andrews 34). Her unified approach to performance through the medium of dance represents a perspective that considers all elements essential contributors to the form. Because of her attention to all of these elements and their confluence within her work, her output was perceived “not as an expression of the music, but as a comprehensive artistic experience”; a description of performative embodiment similar to the distinction made in the previous chapter between an “art of representation” and “art of experiencing”. Her process is described as a series of “structural frameworks with assigned landmarks, a schema for development, or a consistent movement motif. Within that framework, however, change was an important creative factor.” Her body became the translator, the medium of connecting threads in performance; this was present both in her performance practice and her conceptual framework (Andrews 36). Learning about her work inspired me to pursue training and workshops in improvised dance, which in turn helped me liberate my vocal practice by training my entire body (and not only the vocal apparatus) to respond to impulses and inspirations. This is helpful in improvisation but also in a creation process – where bringing an idea into some form of physical or aural existence requires recognizing an impulse and then understanding how to manifest it.

5.6 Knitters/Spinners, contemporary communities

In November and December 2017 I apprenticed with a spinner named Sharon Orpin in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia and began working with spinning wheels and drop spindles. My interest was primarily to come back with physical knowledge for the Rokkur project, described in the case studies, but once again I was hooked by the process, with feeling the fiber transform between my fingers, and I have been continuing making my own yarn separate from any musical practice.

During this time we had many discussions about life and the importance of preserving tradition and slow creation processes. In terms of the symbolism of handcraft I find it quite radical to continue making slow work by hand inside capitalist society, tracing materials back to their source (sweater-yarn-wool-sheep-grass). I’m highly compelled to continue physical tangible practices as I experience the world and even our work as artists being pulled more and more in the direction of online, extra-physical space. I draw a connection to experimental music and small-scale music production in the process of going from something raw and wild to something more refined (or not); filtering material (fiber or sound) through a process of combing, examining, combination of tension and release, the thrill of choosing what goes where and in which way.

Knitting is a unifying practice; knitting in public is a sure way to meet other knitters or just curious passersby. I have stopped counting the number of times I have been knitting on some form of transit that have turned into conversations. Handcraft practices have incredible family lineages; the image of someone knitting or spinning activates amazing stories and memories in many people. Outside of that, Knitting and yarn-loving is an instant community-anchor, meaning that there is a global community of knitters united either online or instantaneously though the practice. One can arrive in many cities, find a local yarn store and spark a conversation. Knitters are at once social and reserved; detail oriented and resourceful. It takes a certain personality to become obsessed with a practice that has been rendered obsolete by mechanized production, to study it, celebrate it, and become specialized in certain areas of it. The women I worked with in Newfoundland were intelligent, quirky, strong and very creative, and knitting was their outlet for creation in everyday life. As an integrated creation practice and a form of “social acupuncture” (Kaplan), a term coined by Canadian Theatre director Darren O'Donnell to mean performative practices that stimulate social situations and interactions and encompasses audience participation, knitting is very valuable, and I am continually learning from my engagement with communities of knitters.

5.2 Dance your Dissertation

The “Dance your Dissertation” competition is an online forum that asks doctoral candidates in mainly scientific fields to create an abstract of their research in dance form, effectively creating a human “embodiment” of their work. Ridiculous as it is, it points to several of the themes present in my research and the direction I have been exploring in performance-creation– first, in its form as a prescriptive work – the organizer, presenting itself in the form of a website, asks the “performing body” - in this case many different bodies in many different physical and geographical locations – to perform a series of actions. It is, in effect, a text score; a “cool” medium; a participatory work which asks a form of “audience” to participate in the completion/achievement of the work. Second, it considers and makes appropriate use of the medium of the internet as a tool for dissemination – the performance space IS the internet – while simultaneously encouraging participants to take time away from heavy computer work, to get out of their heads, and into their bodies. It is a hilarious example of a cyclical relationship between form and content – the ease of sharing video files across large distances allows for many participants to meet in virtual space to share windows into physical performative moments; a step beyond the exercise video which asks many people in many locations to perform specific actions at different times, which is a step beyond verbally-guided folk dance traditions, which asks a group of people situated in common space to perform a synchronized action in real-time response to the vocal directions.

A TED Talk given in Brussels in 2011 by molecular biologist and Dance your PhD founder John Bohannon proposes live dancers both as collaborators in scientific research (citing true examples) and as an alternative to PowerPoint presentations. In a brilliant performative statement, dancers surround him while he speaks against the separation of knowledge by discipline/from body as well as against the elimination of public arts funding, the perceived need to measure efficiency in all endeavours, and the ever-increasing presence of automation and machine labour. Using irony, satire and sarcasm, he imagines a world where dancers are used to explain political and economic situations, naming the human body as a powerful “technology of persuasion”. Considered in this way when compared to PowerPoint or other representative forms, he makes a striking commentary on the expendability assigned to human beings when we are reduced to statistics or cogs in a mechanized process, and makes a strong case for preserving and perpetuating practices of embodiment, holistic technological processes, as it were.

The form of the performance is also notable – the talk is given in the context of the TEDx conference, but could easily hold its own in an avant-garde performance art setting. The scope of audience that this competition and its results are able to reach both online and off is an excellent example for fostering multi-platform interdisciplinary knowledge and collaboration (online resource “Dance Your PhD...”).

5.3.2 Faroese Chain Dance

Faroese chain dance is an ancient dance form still practiced in the Faroe Islands. It is a physical vehicle for folk ballads. The Faroese dance is performed in a circle, with hands held, and consists of a repeated left, left, right step pattern. A leader provides the tempo for the dance and sings the first part of each ballad, allowing a call-and-response dramatic reincarnation of the story, as the bodies of the dancers effectively become the body of the story and a collective technology for its retelling.

“To take part in the Faroese dance is to retell a story and to relive the events of that story... The dance itself revolves around its own centre, to which the thoughts of the dancers are drawn. In this centre the leaders and the other dancers create a world – an ordered world, where they once more relive the events of the ballads, their backs presenting a wall to the chaos outside. The Faroese dance is made up of several elements; the text, the melody, the rhythm of the melody and 'stevið' – the rhythm made by the feet of the dancers. These are the foundation son which the stage is built, where the events in the ballads can unfold. There is too the movement of the ring: the same faces meeting again and again, and with the repeated, suggestive rhythm, with the constantly recurring melody, an intense feeling of fellowship is created around the ballad and the events it relates. The dancers are transported from their ordinary lives into the arena that they have created in the ring. The Faroese dance is folk art – but created by the dancers for themselves. Thought is seldom given to an audience” (Blak et al. 14-15).

Although the ballads can be performed separately, especially in contemporary applications, the dance and ballad is considered one form. Within this form, the lyrics and vocal delivery and theatricality as well as the dance steps and setting for the dance are all part of one practice, and feed each other in a literal physical circle of sound and movement.

5.5 Joik (Sami Vocal Practice)

Joik is a form of vocal music that originated amongst the Sami peoples of Northern Scandinavia. Rather than being a song “about” a person, animal, place or object, a joik is that thing; it is a sonic invocation of the essence of something or someone or somewhere. This conceptual framework is integral to the research I have pursued which searches for strategies to highlight essential truths and specific aspects of situations or experiences (Burke). I have not however chosen at this time and within the framework of this paper to undertake a detailed ethnographic study of this form. Most relevant to this research is not the specificities of the sonority or performance practice of this form, but its idea and aim.

5.7 Monk, Meredith

American composer, choreographer, and extended-voice pioneer Meredith Monk is an important figure to consider when examining interdisciplinary performance work. With voice at the centre of her work, which flows from solo improvisation, concert and choral music to dance, to installation, site-specific performance, film and opera, she has been a clear influence on my output as a performer-composer. As the creative head behind entire productions she has crafted a singular approach to weaving together many perspectives and art forms into unique performances that are difficult to situate in specific genres. Her working approach has been described as closer to a choreographic process than strictly notated contemporary music, and through this she creates highly personal and precise, engaging work.

5.8 Music Theatre (Goebbels, Kagel, et al.)

“While Kagel and others are clear ancestors, too much has happened since the 1970s for that term to work here.” -Jennifer Walshe, The New Discipline

Among the pioneers of the genre known inside of contemporary music as “Music-Theatre” are Mauricio Kagel, Heiner Goebbels, Vinko Globokar and Georges Aperghis. Not to be confused with popular Musical Theatre (related to operetta), music-theatre is a genre of contemporary music performance that also uses gesture, objects and theatrical elements in the expression of the music, within a concert-music context.

While the contents of this research are clearly influenced by the wave of music-theatre composers, the focus has been on influences from knowledge outside of one's own genre; I embarked on this research process intending to study a comprehensive history of theatrical music or music-theatre, and wound up focusing on interpretations of the term “embodiment” in search of my own embodied approach to creation. My work does end up situated within musical contexts most often, because of my training and positionality as a singer who has done most of my professional work in contemporary music settings. However while I am aware that these figures did influence and pave the way for extra-musical elements on the concert music stage, I have been consistently drawing on different approaches and concepts from outside the discipline of music and thus feel further away from the work of these artists.

Having performed extensively, as a singer, the music-theatre work of Georges Aperghis, François Sarhan, R. Murray Schafer, Karlheinz Stockhausen and other composers who notate extra-musical material towards theatrical effect, I am well aware of scored/composed physicality as a phenomenon within contemporary music. I recognize that more detailed consideration of this material especially from a compositional perspective would be valuable to my overall artistic development, however within this research I have chosen to focus more on what has been done outside of pure “musical” environments and how these approaches can be applied.

5.9 Peers, mine

While creating requires making space for much solitary work and thought, I thrive on collaborating with other artists- improvisors, stage directors, composers, media artists, dancers and other artists and practitioners. Their work and approach has influenced me greatly in developing my own approach to creation. I parallel this to my grandmother's resourcefulness in working with the materials in her immediate environment; when I began to understand that I could allow myself to be influenced as greatly by my peers as by major international and historical figures, I felt an incredible liberation. I consider the great value of this section in the research framework to be continual cultivation of awareness of my immediate surroundings, the work of those around me, and how I might learn from observing and taking part in this.

5.4 Gava, Amalia – My Maternal Grandmother and her Handcraft Practice

Work with handcraft and textiles is deeply ingrained in my family history. Both of my grandmothers (Italian on my mother’s side, Romanian on my father’s side) were proficient in knitting and crochet, as well as sewing, embroidery and lace making and I understand this goes back for many generations. Watching both grandmothers make so many household things out of tradition and habit and stubborn all-weathering creativity, after it was no longer a necessity, heavily influenced the way I make music and my DIY roots/sensibilities. I don't understand if it was in my surroundings or in my blood, but I have always been crafty, keen on creating projects using different methods, out of whatever is around. The first time I picked up a pair of knitting needles, though, I knew I would never really put them down!

As I got more interested in knitting, it became a connecting point between me and my maternal grandmother, Amalia “Mae” Gava of Hymers, Ontario, Canada, a small village 40km west of Thunder Bay. We were only in the same place once or twice a year. She would send me stitch swatches in the mail with handwritten instructions on how to do different stitches, or half-finished projects for me to continue knitting. I inherited all of her books and needles/notions as well as many handwritten patterns and cherish them, my last link to her, tools and garments that passed through her hands and kept so many people warm all those long Northern Ontario winters.

Living in a remote village and growing up on a farm, she had to be resourceful and creative. From tea towels to dresses, dolls, Halloween costumes, bingo bags, socks and sweaters, if there was a way to make something instead of buying a disposable one, she did it. I am still inspired by her ability to see materials for what they could become, and likewise to imagine a finished project and be able to identify the required elements from objects in her immediate surroundings.

5.10 Walshe, Jennifer and the “New Discipline”

In Jennifer Walshe's 2016 “compositional manifesto” The New Discipline, she defines and describes an emerging style of working inside of contemporary “classical” compositional circles, focusing precisely on practices of embodiment and recognition of the performing body onstage in musical contexts, arguing that the visual has become as important and present as the sound in an audience's perception and reception of a work.

“The New Discipline is a way of working, both in terms of composing and preparing pieces for performance. It isn’t a style, though pieces may share similar aesthetic concerns. Composers working in this way draw on dance, theatre, film, video, visual art, installation, literature, stand-up comedy. In the rehearsal room the composer functions as a director or choreographer, perhaps most completely as an auteur. The composer doesn’t have aspirations to start a theatre group – they simply need to bring the tools of the director or choreographer to bear on compositional problems, on problems of musical performance. This is the discipline – the rigour of finding, learning and developing new compositional and performative tools. How to locate a psychological/physiological node which produces a very specific sound; how to notate tiny head movements alongside complex bow manoeuvres; how to train your body so that you can run 10 circuits of the performance space before the piece begins; how to make and maintain sexualised eye contact with audience members whilst manipulating electronics; how to dissolve the concept of a single author and work collectively; how to dissolve the normal concept of what a composition is.”

“New Discipline works can easily be designated, even well-meaningly ghettoised, as “music theatre”. While Kagel and others are clear ancestors, too much has happened since the 1970s for that term to work here. MTV, the Internet, Beyonce ripping off Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Stewart Lee, Girls, style blogs and yoga classes at Darmstadt, Mykki Blanco, the availability of cheap cameras and projectors, the supremacy of YouTube documentations over performances. Maybe what is at stake for the New Discipline is the fact that these pieces, these modes of thinking about the world, these compositional techniques – they are not “music theatre”, they *are* music. Or from a different perspective, maybe what is at stake is the idea that all music is music theatre. Perhaps we are finally willing to accept that the bodies playing the music are part of the music, that they’re present, they’re valid and they inform our listening whether subconsciously or consciously. That it’s not too late for us to have bodies” (Walshe).

In this case, embodiment is treated literally, and deals very concretely with the materials of performance. Notable in the first paragraph is Walshe's attention to detail in “finding and developing new compositional and performative tools”, her proposition of borrowing from other fields in a way that goes beyond the superficial. Equally notable, and at the crux of this research, is the recognition of the body (and, I elaborate, the whole being) of the performer as an essential part of the music; that visual elements, context, presentation as well as the personal connection of the performer to the material all play major roles in the audience, performer and composer's respective perceptions and experience of a performance. Beyond this, a creative process (whether it be collaboration towards a new composition, adaptation or or rehearsal of an already existing work) in a case where the physical and wholistic life experience of the performer carries equal weight to the sonic output creates a more meaningful experience and in most cases a more authentic and interesting/personal sonic result as a side effect. A creative process that recognizes the whole being and idiosyncracies of the performer and uses it towards the performance – like in theatre – recognizes that everything is material for creation: rather than filtering out certain phenomena or sounds or actions and encouraging others, we must sharpen ourselves to observe and choose our material well, and then develop it to “perfection”.

5.11 Yoga Music (live)

When I first began working with electronics and looping, I secured a weekly residency at a yoga studio in my neighbourhood where I performed live music for yoga classes in exchange for free classes. This process, and experiencing the classes from both sides (as a facilitator and as a participant) allowed me to reflect on many aspects of teaching, performing and guiding a public through an experience. Things like tone of voice, speed/tempo, clarity, willingness to perform the action alongside those being taught, confidence and sense of humour were important factors contributing to how far I was willing to give myself to the experience of the class. Some days I would find it bizarre to see one body instructing other beings on how to use their own bodies; this prompted me to reflect on the nature of vocal education as well, and gave me ideas about how to approach teaching voice, especially to beginners. In the case of practices like yoga, dance and singing, that don't require “extra” instruments, students are working with familiar material (their bodies) used in slightly altered, new and possibly unfamiliar ways. It can be wonderfully disorienting to discover that your body can do something you had never previously imagined or explored. Pedagogues and performers working with this material must be aware of this fact and provide a safe environment for exploration and learning through responsible teaching, emotional presence and encouraging, supportive guidance.