Percussion Theatre: a body in between

Jennifer Torrence

What does the musician become when sound and instrumental thinking are no longer privileged as the foundation of a musician's practice? In what ways does an emphasis on the musician's body cause music to approach art forms such as theatre and performance? After a generation of pioneering work from Mauricio Kagel, Dieter Schnebel, John Cage and many others, where is the theatrical and the performative in music today? How do its recent developments shape, alter, constitute a musician's artistic practice? Through her research, Jennifer Torrence argues that this type of music demands the musician assume a different understanding and relation to their instrument and therefore a different relation to their body. This relation calls for new ways of making and doing (new artistic practices) that foreground the body as a fundamental performance material. Through an emphasis on the body, the musician emerges as a performer. This exposition is a reflection on the research project Percussion Theatre: a body in between. This project is comprised of a collection of new evening-length works that approach the theatrical and performative in contemporary music performance. These works are created with and by composers Wojtek Blecharz, Carolyn Chen, Neo Hülcker, Johan Jutterström, Trond Reinholdtsen, François Sarhan, and Peter Swendsen. The exposition contains reflections on recent developments in contemporary music that mark a mutation of the executing musician into a co-creating performer, as well as images, artefacts, videos, and texts that unfold the process of creating and performing the work that constitutes this project. The ambition of this exposition is that through the exposure of a personal artistic practice an image of a larger field may come into focus.

Blaha Lujza Tér (2016), Johan Jutterström

Blaha Lujza Tér is a 25-minute piece for solo performer. It is structured in two parts: in the first, the piece is performed at a great distance from the audience; and in the second, the same material is performed at a close proximity to the audience. In the video above, the sound is captured with binaural microphones and the image with a camera positioned above the performer, a perspective that no live audience would experience.

A brief description of the collaborative process

Blaha Lujza Tér was simultaneously created as a part of the research project Ng Revisited and was the fruit of an extensive dialogic partnership with artistic researcher and colleague Johan Jutterström. The starting point of the piece was no external instrument, only the body. Unlike many other pieces created in this project, Blaha Lujza Tér was not co-created. Jutterström and Torrence met for several workshops, which then lead to a final score created by Jutterström. The score uses both traditional music notation and Benesh Movement Notation.

Performance History

9 September 2016: Klangbotton, Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, Sweden

10 September 2016: Klangbotton, Not Quite, Fengersfors, Sweden

21 September 2016: Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Oberlin, Ohio, USA

5 October 2016: Khimaira, Stockholm, Sweden

23 October 2016: Quiet Cue, Berlin, Germany

14 June 2017: Artistic Research Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy

17 October 2017: Kulturtemplet, Levande Musik, Gothenburg, Sweden

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