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.

Sound Touch (2017)

Composed by Wojtek Blecharz, for and with Jennifer Torrence.

Sound Touch redefines the genre of a percussion solo piece, the virtuosity of a percussion player and the role of the listener/viewer as an active participant. Sound Touch can be defined as a durational piece but it also works as a musical practice or “sound-service” offered throughout the day to the participants.

Blecharz believes western society needs urban spaces where people can experience sound in more holistic or embodied ways and Sound Touch creates such opportunity in oppositition to a regular concert situation. The piece was composed entirely from the participant’s perspective, in direct contact with the performer.

Sound Touch as a sound practice must be performed in minimum 2 hour blocks. One cycle of soundtouch lasts about 30 minutes and must be experienced by 4 participants at a time. soundtouch can be performed in maximum 4-hour blocks and can be continued after a 1-hour break.

Sound Touch is supported by the Arts Council Norway, the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme, and the Norwegian Academy of Music.

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