Chantelle Gray live at The Window, an evening of experimental music, performance and visual art at the Theatre Arts Collective, Observatory, Cape Town, 29 January 2017.
Chantelle’s movements are captured by a 3d motion sensor and translated live into controller data for a musical piece written in Supercollider by Aragorn Eloff.
Live non-verbal improvisation performed in absolute darkness, interacting with a cellphone recording from the day before, at The Window, an evening of experimental music, performance and visual art at the Theatre Arts Admin Collective, Observatory, Cape Town, 29 January 2017.
“It’s not easy to improvise… It’s the most difficult thing to do. Even when one improvises in front of a camera or microphone, one ventriloquizes or leaves another to speak in one’s place the schemas and languages that are already there. There are already a great number of prescriptions that are prescribed in our memory and in our culture. All the names are already pre-programmed. It’s already the names that inhibit our ability to ever really improvise. One can’t say what ever one wants, one is obliged more or less to reproduce the stereotypical discourse. And so I believe in improvisation and I fight for improvisation. But always with the belief that it’s impossible. And there where there is improvisation I am not able to see myself. I am blind to myself. And it’s what I will see, no, I won’t see it. It’s for others to see. The one who is improvised here… no, I won’t ever see him.”
— Jacques Derrida, unpublished interview, 1982, reproduced in David Toop’s Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom: Before 1970, Bloomsbury, 2016, pg 21.
Gonna get otherworldly at The Window tonight with these creatures, and many others. Darkness and light @TheatreArtsAdminCollective, Methodist Church, cnr Wesley & Milton Rds, Observatory. The portal opens at 7:30.
Out on Sacred Bones Records.
Theatre Arts Admin Collective
Methodist Church Hall, Cnr Milton Road & Wesley Street, Observatory, Cape Town
Doors open 19:30
R50
20:00 – Main Hall – Lliezel Ellick / Roxanne De Freitas / Rosemary Lombard (vocal performance piece)
20:25 – Main Hall – Louise Westerhout /Keenan Chas Ahrends / Nicola van Straaten (word/sound/dance)
20:40 – Minor Hall – Inka Kendzia / Jessica Smith (video and live performance)
BREAK
21:00 – Main Hall – Rhea Dally / Justin Allart (sound/noise performance)
21:20 – Main Hall – Lucy Hazard / Puleng Lange-Stewart / Hannah Walton (video with spoken word performance)
21:35 – Minor Hall – FAITH XVII (video installation)
BREAK
22:00 – Main Hall – Chantelle Gray (performance piece)
22:20 – Main Hall – Debra Pryor / Mark O’ Donovan (performance piece)
Continuous – Meeting Room 1 – Sydelle Willow Smith (photography)
Continuous – Meeting Room 2 – Miranda Moss (installation)
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THE WINDOW
A window I. A partition. A voyeuristic interface between spaces. A civilizing constraint. Gazing. At the window, through the window, beyond the window. The voyeuristic gaze: preconditioned values, assumptions, desire. The civilizing gaze: conditioning values, assumptions, desire. Gazing. An act of memorializing (it suggests spectatorship, a fetishistic surveying; it suggests participation: in memory, in meaning-making).
A window II. A framing device. Commonly used in art and cinema. To exaggerate part or parts of a figure (forms, tones, shapes, shadows). To recompose an image. To slice up the world into smaller, more wieldy frames. To elicit metaphorical interpretation. (The audience is prompted to step into a world of windows.)
A window III. The window. A composing stratagem. (A perspectival arrangement.) A voyeuristic interface between artist and audience. An invitation to interact with the unknown, the unknowable, the known known. It is not a linear perspective of space, but a cutting up of, slicing into, carving through. (It suggests the existence of another, entirely otherworldly, place.)
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“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”
– Gilles Deleuze
Off Innocence is Kinky (Rune Grammofon, 2013).
Wonderful, as always.
Written and directed by Sara CF de Gouveia, produced by Reinette Du Toit (aka The Oracle), co-produced by Julia Ramsay, starring Siphokazi Khuboni, DOP Felix Seuffert, make-up/hair Tamara Polakow, and more credits on the YouTube link. Music by Shane Cooper.
(Most of the key players in this project were women – more of this please!)
Lliezel Ellick, Rosemary Lombard, Roxanne de Freitas
We will be at The Window on Sunday. You have been warned.
The 18 January 2017 word from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
This resonated for me with a sentiment Rainer Maria Rilke captured in a poem more than a century earlier, in 1913:
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don’t even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me — the far-off, deeply-felt
landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and
unsuspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods–
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house– , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,–
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled, gave back my too-sudden image.
Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening…
Just been thinking it’s really interesting how a lot of the satire I’ve seen about Trumpfest has taken the shape of musical/cabaret… The musical is an OTT form that foregrounds its own fabrication, bombastically, and also the stylised regression to past constructions of nationalist, individualist, whitecishetpatriarchal identity–the American cheesecake nostalgic dream as nightmare for those it doesn’t include. I think it’s a perfect medium for this work.
‘“If we want a world with less suffering and more flourishing, it would be useful to perceive complexity and complicity as the constitutive situation of our lives, rather than as things we should avoid,” she writes. We can’t help that we’ve inherited these problems—a warming Earth, institutional racism, increasingly antibiotic-resistant bacteria—nor can we help sometimes perpetuating them. Better to stop pretending at purity, own up to our imperfections, and try to create a morality that works with them.’
This video is one of the things I treasure most on Youtube – it gives me chills every time. It’s a recording of Liz Mitchell of Boney M performing “Motherless Child” live with the Les Humphries singers in the early 1970s. It’s incredible how Mitchell seems to be singing about her removal from herself via recording, its simulacral persistence beyond her existence in that moment… And the wavering picture also speaks of analog decay, arrested and mummified by its digitisation from analog video and (again lossy) upload to Youtube. And then, of course, the song’s origins in slavery and dispossession. So many degrees of loss, so many layers of noise.
Join us! More details HERE. Dedicating my performance to Mark Fisher, who took his own life the other day. His brilliant work, particularly this blog post on hauntology, has been profoundly influential on how I understand archive and aspire to use sound. I’m so sad he is gone.
Read about the age-old concept of the homunculus and the homunculus argument related to the theory of vision.
Sublime cover of New Order.
Thanks to Helgé Janssen for this record.
“I don’t want to live under the clock; I don’t want to climb to the top…”
One of the hottest garage girl bands ever.
And then they say the same thing a bit differently.
fleurmach 