Rethinking the Performer: Towards a Devising Performance Practice

Jennifer Torrence

The performer’s perspective and the impact of collaboration on the performer’s artistic practice is often overlooked in frameworks designed to analyze collaboration in contemporary music. The conception of what a performer is ‘for’ in the development of a new musical piece is, at least in part, what constitutes a performer’s artistic practice, whether that is the performer as an interpreter and executor of scores, as an adviser to the composer, and/or as a co-creating deviser. The interpreter-adviser-deviser model is conceived as a framework for considering the ways composer-performer collaborations can influence and contribute to the construction of a performer’s artistic practice and subjectivity. Collaboration is not only a method of creating new works, it's also a method for creating artistic practices. Drawing on examples of devised practices as exhibited in Jennifer Torrence’s artistic research, practices which are communicated through reflections, dialogues, images, and videos, the article ultimately argues that it is the performer as deviser that offers the most radical rethinking of the purpose, role, and potential of the performer in contemporary music collaboration.

How to Fight (2016)

by Carolyn Chen & Jennifer Torrence

“One wins who knows when to fight and when not to fight.”

- Sun Tzu

Carolyn Chen & Jennifer Torrence present How to Fight (2016), an assemblage on conflict and its many possibilities for redirection. Navigating the mobile boundary between attack and defense, the work moves fluidly between personal anecdote, martial arts movement, two-part harmony, flashlight choreography, and expository speaking. Individual experiences and approaches to conflict are juxtaposed with strategies for escaping animal attacks, movement exercises from tai chi and aikido, and advice from sages of the Internet and Chinese philosophy.

How to Fight is 50 minutes in length and was created at the Hambidge Center Arts Residency in Georgia, USA in June 2016.

Funding and support provided by

Music Norway, the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme, and the Norwegian Academy of Music.

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