Lecture-Performances
Are you there? - resonant cartography of music (im)materialities
Music, text & performance: Joana Sá
Video (animation) and illustrations: Rita Sá
Some graphic elements of the video: Ana Viana
Body-listening device: Henrique Fernandes
Sound design & operation: Suse Ribeiro
Light design & operation: Tela Negra
Are you there? - resonant cartography of music (im)materialities is a lecture-performance by Joana Sá where her past, present and future solos and reflections around these works converge and diverge, creating an idea and experience of ‘a body as listening’. The lecture-performance format of Are you there? explores the idea of resonant cartography, where the reflection around the creative processes may become resonance and be experienced as sensation, and resonance may become reflection, pondered analysis, intricate thought. Deconstructing the duality of rationality/sensibility, the processes of reflection and resonance are brought fourth as inscribed within one another.
The lecture-performance has its own overwhelming cookies policy: no cookies, no algorithm, none of the usual alienation are allowed here. But no worries, we promise to shake you to the bones. Stating the body of the spectator and listener as the first (im)material musical element of this resonant cartography, this lecture-performance also deconstructs the idea of music as a mere “exteriority” of this body:
Are you there?
Are you really there?
Work comissioned by Musicamera for Festival Criasons IV, dedicated to the composer Constança Capdeville
Premiere: Festival Criasons, Teatro Aberto, Lisbon, April 2023
Other presentations: Cine-Teatro Paraíso, Tomar, April 2023
All my music, video © Rita Sá
A body listening: virtuosity as an unbridgeable gap resounding
LECTURE-PERFORMANCE on the ideas of Listening| the open and virtuosity developed throughout the creative/performance process of Listening | the open, trilogy of solos for disruptive bodies (2010-2016) by pianist-composer Joana Sá. This Lecture-Performance gathers different music pieces/performances, poems, text fragments, and video created for the pieces of this trilogy - through this looking glass (2010), In Praise of Disorder (2013) and Listening: the open (2016).
Music, text & performance, Joana Sá
Video, Daniel Costa Neves
Analysing virtuosity or performance ideals through times, we could argue that they mostly operate through the logic of duality (and opposition) between self/other, inside/outside, control/out of control. From this perspective, different virtuosity and performance ideals can be regarded as different processes of immunization, where each immunity marks the exclusion of the self from the other, the separation of the citizen from the obligations of society, the conservation of the safe and sound (Andrews 2011).
But more recent conceptions of immunity point to different paradigms, where the immune system does not respond to an invading ‘other’ but to an indefinite series of internal differences, so that a ‘self’ does not passively await a transgression of its boundaries, but is always already actively responding to ‘its own’ network connections which now incorporate the ‘other’ within its ‘self’ (idem). From this perspective the immune system, incorporating otherness within the self is from the very beginning self-reacting.
Intimately connected to his concept of deconstruction, Derrida’s autoimmunity also incorporates the other in the self: in his formulation of autoimmunity a self does not exactly attack (itself), in an internal process of closing upon itself, but destroys its ‘own’ defences, and therefore opens itself to the other and risks: for the better or for the worst. Although the autoimmune event is brought by Derrida as a paradoxical and undecidable event mostly from the perspective of the terror and trauma inherent to the deconstructive moment, we will explore Alice Andrews’ idea that it might be precisely possible to inscribe the reconstruction of deconstruction (…) right within the deconstructive movement of autoimmunity.
Exploring the resonant potential of the undecidability of the paradox deconstruction|reconstruction, through the idea of listening, we will try to open for other ways of conceiving music creation/performance and virtuosity beyond the dichotomy of control/out of control. That virtuosity can be thought through a paradoxical perspective of autoimmunity, might be a decision, which does not put vulnerability of the bodies as bypass of the concept, nor just as a consequence of a composing strategy, but at the heart of an idea of body-music expression (that is in no way seeking for ideas of authenticity, rawness or essence of the bodies).
Undecidability as vacillation, oscillation, resonant paradoxical self-reflection is
an unbridgeable gap resounding the impossibility of acknowledging what a body can do.
virtuosity is then engaging with
as unbridgeable gap
virtuosity as unbridgeable gap
re | sounding
Presentations
DARE: Assemblage 2019 Conference - Third International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research, Orpheus Institute, Gent, BE, 2019;
EIPC - IV International Contemporary Piano Meeting, Teatro Helena Sá e Costa, Porto, PT, 2019. Presentation as keynote speaker/artist;
Hands On Research Symposium Aveiro University, Aveiro, PT, 2019. Presentation as keynote speaker/artist;
A shorter and simplified version of this lecture-performance was presented at the presentation of Coreia #1 (publication of experimental, critical and discursive nature about the arts in general, with special affiliation to the medium of dance), Estúdio Victor Córdon, Lisbon, PT, 2019.
Performance of excerpts of ‘In Praise of Disorder’ by Joana Sá at the conference/ meeting.