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The music before the music: Exploring the liminal spaces in sound as music for dance installation and dance theatre: i) Threshold:Fleshfold; and ii) Myths and Stories about her

Wilsmore, Robert ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1584-6239 (2005) The music before the music: Exploring the liminal spaces in sound as music for dance installation and dance theatre: i) Threshold:Fleshfold; and ii) Myths and Stories about her. [Performance]

Item Type: Performance
Creators: Wilsmore, Robert
Abstract:

The two projects, through different angles, exploit the spaces between intended communication, performance and meta-communication. Both pieces were funded, in part, by the Arts Council and both were performed at the PARIP conference at Bretton Hall in 2005. 'Threshold:Fleshfold', a commission from Foreign Bodies dance theatre drew together choreographer Vida Midgelow (Director of Foreign Bodies Dance Theatre), set designer Brendan O’Conner (Royal Opera) and myself (composer). The work focuses on foregrounding the background, often minimal in vocabulary, visually and sonically, the piece reduces out the historic practice and techniques of the art forms allowing small details, folds within folds, to be examined. The sound is a complex polyrhythmic work constructed from recordings made from a choir. Previously I had recorded and produced a CD of‘music’ for a choir, however the recorded moments before the first note is sung, where preparation and anticipation create a liminal and transitional space between rehearsal, non-performance and performance, produced delicate utterances of breathing and note preparation that to me, as the listener, was a more interesting artistic experience than the performance of the music. This became the sonic material for construction. ‘Myths and stories by her’, commissioned by Red Leaf Dance and choreographed by Jane Bacon uses the choreographer as performer, subject and documenter. Using similar techniques to the audio construction of ‘Threshold’, ‘Myths’ draws its sounds from interviews with the choreographer, sometimes constructed into complex polyrhythms, sometimes merely selected and left un-‘composed’ and un-‘choreographed’. The main compositional methodology is that of polyrhythmic binaural constructs of recorded human utterances, almost entirely un-manipulated (in terms of filtering, modulating etc. or breaking the source bond) they alternate left to right at fixed rates that are layered in specific ratios (2:3, 7:9 etc) that turn and interact like geometric patterns on pre black-figure Greek vases.

Date: 29 June 2005
Event Location: PARIP Conference 2005, Bretton Hall, Leeds
Subjects: P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN2000 Dramatic representation. The Theatre
School/Department: School of the Arts
URI: https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/186

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