Lectures and Seminars

‘a body as listening’ - paths towards other composer/performer paradigms
Joana Sá, composer-performer (pianist), invited speaker

The composition/performance dichotomy is an ‘invention’ of the 20th century. It arose, among many other reasons, as a ‘safety distance’ between the two metiers, seeking to put an end to what was considered the frivolous subjectivity of the Romantic composer-performer paradigm. The composer-performer paradigm has mostly been regarded, since then, as doomed to succumb to this subjectivity and/or frivolity. In order to create an immunity to this ideal of musical subjectivity, a new ideal was created in the 20th Century in addition to the separation of these roles: the one of objectivity. Based on my work as an artist composer-pianist, which deconstructs the dichotomies of performance/composition, self/other, control/out of control, subjective/objective, listening subject/listening object, materiality/immateriality, etc., we'll talk about paths towards other conceptions of the performer-composer. Grounded on the body(ies) and on the concept and experiences of listening as resonant relation with otherness, it seeks to open up to other forms of musical creation. We'll discuss my most recent work ‘a body as listening - resonant cartography of music (im)materialities’, which has multiple autonomous but complementary outputs: the performance a body as listening premiered at Culturgest, the album released by Clean Feed, the book published by Sistema Solar/Teatro Praga, a lecture-performance, a virtual installation, etc. It will be a great pleasure to share. these works and ideas and discuss them with you!

Joana Sá, Keynote Speaker/Artist

Presentation of my ongoing project “a body as listening: resonant cartography of music (im)materialities”, a broader and fragmentary project with multiple outputs - a performance, a book, a record, a lecture-performance, and the virtual installation www.abodyaslistening.com

RESONANT CARTOGRAPHY
The idea of a resonant cartography is not intended as an exercise to represent something (a musical practice) that is exclusively outside itself (cartography), but as a new space of musical experience and practice instead: cartography and navigation are not really opposed perspectives in this context, they are one inscribed within another.

In this resonant navigation and cartography, the latter does not really relate to the former in a logic of representation
there is no dual distinction
between the act of navigating and cartographing
between the act of cartographing and its cartographed musical objects.

This means again,
that somehow, the process of cartography ought to
become resonant itself.

or, that the process of cartography will become,
a resonant (im)material of the cartography it produces
and a part of the musical territory it explores

The idea of resonant cartography is not conceived of as a guiding device either, one whose main purpose is to give references for orientation and control in a pre- determined space or music territory, but quite the opposite: it attempts to incite all bodies involved in this sharing process to lose, at some rate, both their x-y-z coordinates of internal/external organization and their internal/external orientation references, in order to open up the possibility for creating other notions of space, body and music territory (not conceivable in a grid-cartography paradigm).

'through this looking glass' is the first piece and performance for piano and sound extensions of a major project Corpus (…a poetic catalogue) by Joana Sá. Inspired by the surreal and dreamlike world of Lewis Carroll and exploring the ‘gap’ between music and poetry, the piece is divided into two different parts: '13 mini(cre)atures for robert schumann' and 'freedom means little. what i desire still has no name'.
The performance 'through this looking glass' was captured by film director and cinematographer Daniel Costa Neves into a black and white movie with the same title. Daniel closely follows and transforms every musical gesture into unique pictures of sensitive and depurated aesthetic. Whether it is music that we see or images that we hear, we'll never know. There's no line that divides or designates territories: Joana and Daniel build something hardly definable yet overwhelming and original.

Conference
Corpus (…a poetic catalogue) – a major project aiming towards possible and impossible revolutions of the performing body.

Corpus (…a poetic catalogue) is a major (and possibly lifetime) project that aims to rethink/reformulate, reinstate/recreate each time the bodies in music performance or generally the bodies in artistic creation. It is a catalogue of mainly musical pieces/performances, which are transversal and multi-dimensional in its configuration, being the collaboration with cinematographer and film director Daniel Costa Neves a key-element for this aspect. After watching the film through this looking glass, the conference will focus on the main aspects and aims of this project, specifically on the trilogy Listening | the open composed by through this looking glass (2010), In Praise of Disorder (2013), and Listening: the open (2016-)), which constitutes the first part of Corpus (…a poetic catalogue).

Although conceived in very disparate ways through times, different virtuosity ideals show that there is an ontological and almost stable conception of the performing body as a mediator between dualities (outside/inside; form/matter). The anthropological machine incises the performing body, shaping it according to the ideals in vogue of the making human subject, through different times. The performing body is then erased and shaped as a kind of channel for another reality, a realm from the outside, that can be an ideal of sublime in the Romantic, or the objective ‘musical work’ in the structuralist approaches of the 20th century. The new field of Performance Studies brings new ideas that try to contradict the strict dualities, bringing new concepts of ‘musical work’ and acknowledging Performance as a place for creation of meaning, instead of assigning it the usual role of reproduction of meaning. However, these new formulations, which try to go against the claimed ‘objectivity’ of the werktreue ideals, oppose them within the same logics of duality, calling for the subjectivity of the performer – the intentional, the emotional, the personal narrative, the all too human (Assis) subject.
The formalist and structuralist conceptions left (and still leave) energetic forces, impulses and processuality behind, focusing on a rigid and immutable structure that should be imposed upon the performing body, whereas subjectivity approaches of Performance studies, focusing on the will and intention, tend to bypass the pre-human, post-human, the non signifying and non-organized body.
As composer/performer my research has been focusing on finding directions for opening new ways of thinking musical creation and musical performance beyond usual semiotics and beyond the organized and emotional narrative. My paper will focus different perspectives of a virtual dimension of the body, a dimension that can open new insights for thinking musical creation and performance. For this, I will make a short introduction to some complex concepts by different authors: on the one hand, I will present ideas of Jean Luc Nancy and Peter Szendy and on the other, ideas of Brian Massumi, Gilbert Simondon, Paulo de Assis and Lucia D’Errico.

2016 Porto International Conference on Musical Gesture as Creative Interface
PERFORMA 2015
POST IP 2015
POST IP 2013