Bojana Cvejić, Cédric Dambrain, Camille Durif-Bonis, Nestór García Díaz, Neto Machado, Tom Pauwels, Jean-Luc Plouvier, Cyriaque Villemaux, Franck Christoph Yeznikian
Liberating Performance from Score
LIBERATING PERFORMANCE FROM SCORE from Akademie Schloss Solitude on Vimeo.
Jean-Luc Plouvier, Tom Pauwels
Liberating the Music from the Score
There is nothing to liberate from!
The escape from eurocentrism, the rise of electronic music, the new improvisation scene leads to the idea that the contemporary moment is the one of “the end of the note.” It does not mean that the mediation of a “score” between the musician and the listener, between an idea and listening, has to be abolished. Without this mediation, the musician could consider himself as a scientist (affecting the body immediately with audio waves) or as a shaman (affecting the mind immediately with vibes): two vainglorious states of mastery.
Actually, there is enough substance for musical notation. There is writability from the top. Music is all writability from its (non)origin. With or without notes, the question will be: composer, what exactly are you scoring?
Robert Philips, Cèdric Dambrain, Franck Yeznikian: three Solitude fellows gave us the opportunity to list some examples of “scoring beyond the note.”
Cédric Dambrain
The escape from eurocentrism, the rise of electronic music, the new improvisation scene leads to the idea that the contemporary moment is the one of “the end of the note.” It does not mean that the mediation of a “score” between the musician and the listener, between an idea and listening, has to be abolished. Without this mediation, the musician could consider himself as a scientist (affecting the body immediately with audio waves) or as a shaman (affecting the mind immediately with vibes): two vainglorious states of mastery.
Franck Christoph Yeznikian
An Improvisation
The work presented in the framework of Liberating Performance from Score questions the dimension of the traditions of writing (the graph) and the other magic, more immediate one, of the improvisation which is, in fact, never without this presence of one invisible score laying somewhere in us. From an another side of the thematic, it will be necessary to present an instrumental work with electronics which, even if it is strictly written, has a spectral part in inheritance which results from an improvisation. A professor of improvisation taught me that improvisation does not act in itself: “l’improvisation ne s’improvise pas.” There is always a kind of palimpsest in an improvisation and the result is most of the time a variation. Concerning a score, we could see basically two axes to write a score: writing the music before the sign (the sign receives, contains the musical drive) or writing the music from the signs (the sign produces more than it contains by the composer in his intern ears). Despite of that, each music escapes in itself to the magical part of its apparition. Liquid Room Subtilior commissioned by the ensemble Ictus is a dive through the various layers which contracts my music from multiple traditions which could be seen somehow opposite. It also asks in this case, how to compose a gesture of a tone which converges in dialog with the touch (il senso del tatto) of a clavichord to an electric guitar. Each kind of touch has its historical context (Barthes) and signification of freedom. A score is not antinomic with the freedom because freedom emerges always conditional. In my music the score is the space which gives a face and a genealogic life (tramaturgie) to my music. A score is also a condition to reach a freedom which touches to a being beyond the composer’s, player’s, and public’s representation.
Camille Durif-Bonis, Nestór García Díaz, Cyriaque Villemaux
EN
(solos)
EN
A dance of the economy. No useless agitation. Yet, a dance that has some nerve. A dance that is not worth its price and is therefore considered as expensive.
A dance that offers something more. With regard to any other dance.
An expensive dance is not generous even so.
An expensive dance asks for an estimation, a value judgment.
A dance of the subtle.
A dance that hurts a bit.
A dance that seems sacrosanct. Image: Frolicking nymphs.
A simple means to approach this dance: persuade yourself that this dance is dear to you and thus subscribe to the general opinion. Thus contributing a bit more to its fame, its value. Rather expensive.
A dance that could be appreciated out of those considerations.
A dance that arrives after an other dance.
A dance that accepts its future status in obsoletion. A dance that belongs to a collection of dances.
A dance of refreshment.A new dance is not necessarily fashionable.
A dance in which every thing is allowed, except to redo. A dance that arouses interest in the first minutes and
that’s it.A dance with surprising potential.
A dance that makes disappear, and which is doomed to disappear, itself.
A missing dance.
A dance that one imagines more than sees.
A dance of which one constructs the memory for oneself. A concrete dance, nevertheless.
At the end of the day, a dance more linked to space than to time.A chosen dance and for sure, a choice cut.
How to leave:
ATTENTION
Head down, staring at the feet. Pride is washed away.
Op, a shower.
EN [PDF 40 kb]
Bojana Cvejić, Lennart Laberenz
“… in a non-wimpy way”
To study fighting is something we can’t be afraid to do.
Steve Paxton
Before it came to be criticized as a New Age shuffleboard, “a post-hippie suburb of the soul,” Contact Improvisation was an art-sport that emerged from Steve Paxton’s training in aikido and athletics just a few years after Paxton’s explicit action-pieces against the Vietnam War (for example Collaboration with Wintersoldier). What aikido – the martial art that distinguishes itself by redirecting attack and blending with the attacker – did for Contact Improvisation in relation to war and engagement in a physical struggle hasn’t been an issue of political interest.
At the Mad Brook Farm in Vermont, an idyllic place where Paxton has cultivated his “pessimism” during the 40 years in which Contact Improvisation spread worldwide and an “empire declined,” the artist revisits the art-sport in terms of physicality, violence, and protection. What did it mean to be responsible for “falling well,” both literally and metaphorically?
Video; wall projection; 19'
featuring excerpts from the videos by Contact Collaborations Inc.
Courtesy of Contact Collaborations, Lisa Nelson, Steve Paxton
Pat Catterson, Irene Lotspeich-Phillips, Virginia Mosklaveskas, Glenn Phillips, Lisa Nelson.
Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, The Getty Research Institute
Lennart Laberenz is a filmmaker and writer who lives in Berlin.
Bojana Cvejić is a performance theorist and maker based in Brussels.
Steve Paxton © Lennart Laberenz
Neto Machado
As a way of opening the discussion around the idea of score and the performing arts field, we used as a starting point the proposition created for Tate Modern, in May 2014, in the context of an event interested in the idea of social choreography. For this event, Bojana Cvejić addressed the question of publicness through a series of experiments staged within the public arena of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Invited to manifest the book Public Sphere by Performance, that she co-wrote with Ana Vujanović, in this space, and working with and amongst Tate’s mass audience, Cvejić invited Christine De Smedt, Lennart Laberenz, Neto Machado and Nikolina Pristaš to test choreographic patterns for Tate Modern’s visitors, elaborating upon and interfering with the audience flow. Those patterns were based in constructed scores/scenarios that were a list of questions that the audience answered by positioning themselves at that space in a specific way.