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.

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