This year the Il Corpo nel Suono conference will include lecturers from Tisch School of the Arts in New York: Tisch Dance Visiting Assistant Arts Professor Allen Fogelsanger and Alan Good will address the topic of pause and repetition as tools for framing rudimentary gestures in the real-time movement/sound Composition; MFA 2019 alumni Kristen Foote with Allen Fogelsanger will lecture on the Chaconne by José Limòn after Bach’s music; Tisch Dance Arts Professor Andy Teirstein will present his project Translucent Borders, examining ways that music and dance can engage cultures across borders, in the absence of a common spoken language.
The Il Corpo nel Suono conference will be held at the Accademia Nazionale di Danza in Rome from October 31 to November 3. The conference, now in its fifth edition, will host musicians, dancers, performers, lecturers, scholars, anyone who deals with the relationship between sound and movement, in all its multifaceted aspects. As in its previous editions, the aim is to gather the experiences of different geographical and cultural areas and try to let them mutually interact.
Lectures/Performances:
Dance/Music Relationships in José Limón’s Chaconne
Kristen Foote | Allen Fogelsanger
lecture-performance
November 2, 14.30-16.00 | Teatro
In this hour-long lecture/demonstration we present a choreomusical analysis of the work, and in particular aim at articulating the method of choreographic variation embodied in the dance. We break down the choreographic components and the dance’s variations in terms of the thematic motifs, and examine how the dance relates to the musical score. Additionally we touch upon the intersections among choreographic design, music visualization, and dancer interpretation. This compositional understanding provides a common ground from which dancers and musicians can launch original approaches to this and similar dance works. Features a live performance of Chaconne.
Pause and Repeat: Real-Time Movement/Sound Composition
Alan Good | Allen Fogelsanger
lecture-performance
November 1, 14.30-16.00 | Teatro
Our latest work, When In..., comes out of a two-year series of experiments in performed composition. These pieces realize our own particular synthesis and development of 20th/21st century abstraction with improvisation, and go hand-in-hand with an evolving conceptual framework for presenting movement and sound, dance and music, as visual and auditory material worthy of close attention from an audience whose time is deeply respected. Our primary artistic strategy is to employ pause and repetition as tools for framing rudimentary gestures and phrases and revealing underappreciated elements and qualities. The audience responses to our fomalist compositional designs so far have surprised us. People still sense narrative; they see or hear images. These reactions subvert and build on what remains the open non-linear temporal architecture of our performances. We use various configurations of dancers and musicians. The project started in January 2017 at University Settlement in New York and has continued with shows at The West End Theater in New York and at Scholes Street Studio in Brooklyn.
Translucent Borders: The “Mother-Tongue” in Collaborative Music and Dance
Andy Teirstein
lecture/workshop
November 3, 14.30-16.30 | Teatro
A border can be represented by a line. But it can also be viewed more expansively, as its own space, fertile with the potential for either confrontation or learning and evolution. This study examines ways that music and dance can engage cultures across borders, in the absence of a common spoken language. Focusing on Translucent Borders, a three-year investigation at New York University, we consider various uses of improvisation at points of cultural juxtaposition. Translucent Borders is a project exploring ways that dancers and musicians act as catalysts for creative engagement across geographic and cultural borders. Beginning in refugee camps in Lesbos in 2016, Translucent Borders has facilitated global conversations between dancers and musicians in Israel, Palestine, Greece, Cuba, and Ghana through interviews, knowledge-sharing circles, improvisation, and performance. The project is a Working Group of NYU’s Global Institute for Advanced Study. In 2018, the world master dancers and musicians with whom the project has been working came to the United States for a series of encounters resulting in world premiere performances at the Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival, Lincoln Center, and New York University. This presentation articulates some of the inherent tensions in the use of improvisation over the course of the project and its performances. For instance: bringing together composers who use written notation, with master musicians who work primarily in a non-notational environment, can raise many challenges to both representative contingents, not just in the various aspects of sound production, but psychologically and territorially.