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.

No Say No Way (2015)

a show by François Sarhan

performed by Jennifer Torrence

No Say No Way takes the form of a lecture-recital gone terribly wrong. The lecturer, purportedly an expert researcher and performer of the iconic percussion instrument, the triangle, strives to give a presentation on her topic of expertise. Despite her apparent prowess, the performer quickly crumbles under the pressures of performance and becomes crippled by self-doubt. She spends the entire duration of the presentation fumbling around the stage, losing her way, and losing her confidence. Ultimately, she fails to ever transfer any “real” knowledge to her expectant audience. Instead, the spectator is faced with the realities of failure: self-doubt, procrastination, superstition, embarrassment, shame, lost papers, lost instruments, lost trains of thought...

Tragic-comic and Sisyphean, No Say No Way highlights the reality of anxiety in music performers and the insatiable desire for transcendence through art.

Funding and support provided by

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

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