A brief description of the collaborative process
Sound Touch was created in a highly collaborative process whereby the sounds, materials, instruments, and use of space were developed through a process of improvisation that lasted one week. It was created to stimulate and activate the spectator’s body and was made primarily with/through the body of Wojtek Blecharz as spectator. Blecharz then selected sounds and structured the piece. The score is traditionally notated; however, the scores mainly serves as a frame for structured improvisations.
Sound Touch (2017) by Wojtek Blecharz
in collaboration with Jennifer Torrence
A 30-minute work for solo percussionist and four blindfolded audience-participants. The piece is designed to show the physicality of sound through an immersive, physical, and collective experience.
Support from Arts Council Norway and the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme.
I premiered Sound Touch in Warsaw, Poland at the Istalakcje 7 Festival at Nowy Teatr. The festival was made of a dozen one-to-one pieces—one performer and one audience member. Often these pieces dealt with proximity, bringing the performer and the sound extremely close to the audience members, to the point of physical touch. The one-to-one aspect meant that each of the pieces was performed up to 100 times across the span of two days. Given the demand that so many performances may be required in order to show Sound Touch at all, Wojtek and I chose to accept this premise as an area of exploration within the piece: we were interested in exploring exhaustion. It was a possible way into understanding the body, the real body that I am/have, and how it reveals itself in performance. Sound Touch has a duration of thirty minutes and thus we understood that it would take many hours to reach a reasonably sized audience. In the end, I performed it seventeen times across two days, which translates to (with the reset of the instruments and a water break) nearly 13 hours of performing.
In this piece, the audience never sees me. They lay on mats and cover their eyes with sleeping masks for the duration of the performance. Before and after the piece I am absent, as if I am a sort of sounding spirit. Across the thirty minutes, I literally bring the four audience-participants in contact with sound. Whether exploring the spatiality of sound by moving bowed cymbals and crotales above and across their faces, or by handing them simple percussion instruments to perform, or laying instruments across their body that I then play on sending vibrations through their bodies, the piece is about the physicality of listening and the physicality of sound.
What became apparent already on the first day is that exhaustion, if it is not made a spectacle for the audience to see, is very boring. It’s boring to be tired. And especially so when you don’t even experience the glory of another person recognizing your heroic efforts. By the end of the second day it was running through my head that this was the closest thing to torture I had ever experienced. I prayed that the four audience members wouldn't show up so that we could cancel at least one run of the performance, to cancel one 45-minute session of utter physical exertion.
Wojtek and I wondered how this situation of increasing fatigue would change the music, if it would become increasingly impossible for me to perform the piece with presence and precision. But the reality was quite surprising. I experienced that the people who made up the audience gave a kind of energy that was quite literally, life giving. The energy they gave made it possible, time and time again, to perform with a youthful energy, as if it were my first time and after a long and restful sleep. This situation of exhaustion did not yield the expected results of deterioration in the music. At best it was the five minutes between runs, where I was allowed to take a sip of water and consider my life and the situation that I found myself in that I could understand that this whole activity had a slightly sadistic quality. And in those moments, I hoped that the next audience (that invariably always appeared) could wipe the memory of pain from my mind once again.
The most important aspect of this piece would not be exhaustion or my own body. It would be the experience of being so close to so many different kinds of audience bodies. There were female and male bodies, trans bodies and cis bodies, skinny and fat, young and old. They were often bodies I had never had the chance to be so close to before. The first task in contact with the audience is to touch their hand in the process of offering them a simple percussion rattle. Across the days I began to understand what kind of quality of touch is required to communicate to a blindfolded stranger what I need them to do. I need them to take this percussion instrument and make sound with it, however they feel is correct. I can show them with my own playing, but they are also free to explore. As soon as I approached a person I could feel their energy, their position with or against the situation they had found themselves in. Their openness or resistance was felt immediately. I can’t say for sure if it is the energy of the person, something on their face, something unspoken, but immediately I could understand if this person would need some extra care, or if this person was open and ready to undergo whatever I would throw at them.
The first touch is critical. I found there was a way of touching the hand, arm, and wrist, in the first gesture of giving the sounding objects away that is both firm in the sense that it communicates that the person touching them has control but also soft in the sense that the person touching them is not dangerous. It has something to do with the surface area covered by my hand, and it has something to do with pacing. But it also has to with listening through the body, adjusting to the spectator when they show their needs and desires, but always offering my own leadership that shows they are safe.
The most unique body for me to be close to was an old man. I never had a close relationship with any elderly men. My grandfathers had passed away before I was old enough to think about their body in such a way, to think about the physicality of ageing. To smell an older man, to see the hair growing in their ears, to take the same care with them as a body I feel more used to being close to. This was a wonderfully bizarre and life giving experience.
There is a section where I lay boards across the hips of the participants and a Chinese cymbal rests on their sternum. I found out quickly that not all bodies can have a cymbal on their chest, and indeed not all bodies have hips that easily balance a board. It wasn’t that we hadn't considered this fact, but it was another thing to be in a situation with new body after new body and quickly having to improvise the best possible way to provide this experience of having a instrument resonating through their bones, while still fitting the individuality of each body.
Another wonderful moment occurs near the end of the piece when remote control vibrators (the common sex toy) are taped to the chests of the audience participants. One by one I take the vibrator, press it to the sternum of the participant and take their hand to teach them how to apply enough pressure as to make the vibrations felt through their bones. Across the next few minutes I occasionally change the pattern that the vibrator “plays”, moving through a variety of pulsing rhythms. Each participant reacts very differently to this object. It goes with out saying that most men did not know what exactly I had attached to them. But it was the knowing smile on the women’s faces, a smile that often turned into laughter, that time and time again gave a sense of communion. Another situation where the private is shared. (The point of the piece is not to draw attention to the object being used, but then again, all objects we bring into our work carry their own histories, meaning, and associations.)
After the piece was over, I would allow the audience to lay in silence on their mats. Every group reacted so differently. Every group came in as four individuals, but a group culture was consistently created almost instantaneously from the moment the piece began. Occasionally this culture would transform through the situation of a collective experience, an understanding that as four individuals they had become a group that underwent a unique experience, one that would be difficult to share with the outside world. In these groups, their desire to lay on the mats in silence together was almost palpable. There was occasionally the feeling that no one wanted to get up for fear of breaking the precious silence that they had finally be afforded. Occasionally one or two people would continue to play, touching the instruments around their heads, or making sounds of their own invention.
Once they arose there was every reaction from wonder, to continued fear of the unknown, to an overwhelmed feeling that can only come from total surrender to a situation, and of course, there were the ones still busy “figuring it out”. It was their reactions, and my privilege in witnessing their person, their energy, sometimes in transformation, and sometimes in simple being that was the most important and giving aspect of this piece. It was something I could never grow exhausted from.
This piece is about listening through the body. Literally listening to the vibrations of sound, but also listening through touch, by being near another person. It is about giving up control and being willing to adjust to the spectator when they show their needs and desires. But it is also about the generosity of leading the piece and showing that each person is safe and that they are seen. It’s about empathy. And I had never experienced this so strongly in performance before.