Music
•
Interdisciplinary
Lynn
Book's performance work has always manifested in forms that defy convention
and easy description. Performance art was therefore an apt, though
unruly terrain for her to invent within and from for the past two decades.
This work ranges from visually to physically charged hybrids, the earliest
of which were springing from movements within the art world - conceptualism,
body work; endurance oriented, sculpturally related. Over the past 15 years,
her performances were located more in a solo performance theater context,
increasingly engaging theatrical convention as a means to address issues
of structuring power through relationships and identities.
Book's voice centered work grew out of
the interdisciplinary performance work and became a pursuit in its own
right over the past decade and has been flagged in new music camps
"Chicagos
most adventurous female voice- highly expressive, intense and often theatrical,
Book is part of a worldwide wave of outrageous vocal explorers."
-John Corbett, Chicago
Reader; critic and author of Extended Play: Sounding Off from John
Cage to Dr. Funkenstein
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as "adventurous"
but is never strictly music either. Like the interdisciplinary performance
work, the vocal work has a strong relationship to body, text and image.
In fact, the link for all of Book's work is not the form so much as the
larger conceptual project of 'body'.
Through the years, Lynn Book has been engaged
with the ways in which the body is indelibly influenced, indeed constructed
by, prevailing social orders. Language, representation and social behaviours
are systemetizing practices that she has mined for material for performances
and vocal compostions alike from "Physical Vision" (1989-90) to
"tongue" (1991) to "Song of O" (1997). Her agenda has many
times been to reveal the structuration of body and desire through social
schema in order to subvert, and at the same to validate unstirred potential
for reinvention - that is, to reinvent self. The ground where ideas and
flesh collide is a risky site wherein she can explore the permeable boundaries
that tenuously (sometimes strenuously) hold us captive. Sexuality, one
of Book's favored sites to examine power relations comes through in performance
and compositions alike (hear "Native Power" (1993) excerpt on Recordings
page and view a video excerpt from "Gorgeous Fever" (1994-97).
The presence of the voice has evolved as
a profound, mediating force in Book's entire oeuvre, giving way to a 'will
to power' that far outreaches
"Lynn
Book is an intelligent and influential composer/ singer/ performance artist
whose performances are strange and captivating·"
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anything the body alone can do, or the written
word. Voice became the nexus through which all exchange must pass, enlivening
and empowering potential for a more resonant 'becoming' (in both vocalizer
and listener). It is through voice that endless possibilities for defying
social norms; extending and understanding the mystery of body, that the
most intensive communications between self and other occur. What you may
actually hear, is a jazz influenced song here ("Native Power", "Dream
River", 1992, hear excerpt on Recordings page) or a more experimental
vocal/text work there ("Skin" 1999, see and hear excerpt on Video
page), but the use of the voice in an extended way is always a paean to
the larger project of the 'voiced body' (read more about this on
the Voicelab info page).
