| Many of the music performances, like this one, are performed as structured improvisations based on texts that are then set to 'soundscapes'. Some have particular melodic motifs or rhythmic patterns that recur and give the work a 'symphonic poem' form, others are more clearly song compositions. This video clip is a collage of two separate structured improvisations performed on the same evening concert to give a sampling of the dynamic differences. "Skin" is more introspective in sounding the shifting states of bodily experience, and "Whale" is more public in its calls for choral responses from the audience to attend to the issues of mass consumption. |
|
|
Gorgeous Fever is a baroque cabaret drama which explores womans' body through a delirium arguably induced by social ills. The performance endeavors to reveal the subterranean reaches of cultural constructions of the feminine by collapsing medical, sexual and entertainment arenas. This passage includes the end of an opening segment wherein a woman describes her "condition" from her perspective, via reveries of breathing and sensorial ecstasies. She is revealing to us that she has found "a system for coming back to life". This reverie is interrupted by a "medical drama" which becomes a dialogic diagnosis about "the patient" conducted by the musicians (in view throughout the entire performance performing music and soundscapes and occasional interventions into the "body" of the work). The following seqence is a passage back through the darkness of the woman's unnameable malady. She sings a kind of blues - a lament for the body. |
| This excerpt from Mercuria catches a transitional moment that is exploring relations between being Self and Other - a gendered dynamic is evident here but slipping continually through the grasp of customary meaning via repeated calls and falls ("leave me", "hold me", "enter me"). This shifting bleeds right into an extended physical narrative sequence wherein Theo and I set up textual elements ("the moon", "two fighters") and modulate them over a period of time while jogging and moving in place until we evolve a story of a scientist who has been poisoned by mercury in her laboratory. This story represents one of the more overt connections to the overall theme of change, mutation, adaptation and resistance - especially ephemeral things that get played out materially: spirit, sexuality, imagination and identity. |
|
