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.

What Noises Remain (2016)

Created by Peter Swendsen & Jennifer Torrence

Performed by Jennifer Torrence

with contributions from

Amy Miller, Asha Tamarisa, Christiana Rose, Vera Rudi, Gunhild Mathea Olaussen, Juliana Zara, Daniel James

What Noises Remain is 50-minute performance for percussion soloist, electronic sound, video, texts, objects, and actions that is loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s, The Tempest.

"We sometimes go in search of the remnants and records of past events, but we also sometimes find ourselves immersed in a place with a history unknown to us, a history almost entirely reclaimed by the place itself. In these places, on this island, we see and hear beneath surfaces, catch fragments of meaning at the edges of perception, and project ourselves into a narrative that is both tangible and imagined. Here there was captivity, freedom, cunning, and hope. Desolation, destruction, and renewal. Here was both the center of the world and the place of exile. Fragments remain. Magic remains. Whether this be or be not, I’ll not swear…"

Funding and support provided by

Arts Council Norway, Norwegian Artistic Research Programme, Music Norway, Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Norwegian Academy of Music

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