"Here are some scores for you to do"
A weekend workshop exploring the feminist performance score
Electra, Third Floor, Shacklewell Studios
Saturday 27 and Sunday 28 September 2014, 11am - 7pm
£10 / £5 concessions
Booking essential, email
bookings@electra-productions.com
An intensive weekend-long exploration of the feminist performance score through a number of modalities including reading, listening, watching, discussion, play and performance.
The avant-garde score, deriving instruction for performance from the toss of a dice, the I Ching, a series of notes or a text, can be seen as a basis for 'free' composition based upon utopian and emancipatory ideals. While the sonic results of an open work could be appreciated as 'randomly generated', 'natural' or spontaneous, in fact the outcome may be tightly regulated by the specific political economy of the compositional structure. This intensive workshop, occurring over two days, seeks to examine some of the ways in which the feminist performance score may operate through and produce alternative logics, examining the processes and outcomes that set the feminist score apart from traditional processes embedded within the avant-garde open score.
The workshop will investigate works such as Pauline Oliveros' To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation (1970) and Annea Lockwood's Piano Transplants (1968-), among other more recent scores and related texts, recordings and moving image, across multiple generations, and through collaboration between attendees, seek to experience the feminist score as a social event. The workshop derives its title from the introduction to Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood's self-published 'Womens Work', which gathered in its two volumes of 1975 and 1978, performance scores by a diverse range of women practitioners from Simone Forti to Christina Kubisch.
The workshop is organised by Cathy Lane, Co-Director CRiSAP, and Holly Ingleton with Electra. It is open to everyone, with no particular musical, or other, experience required, on a first-come-first-served basis, and includes lunch and refreshments on both days.
Cathy Lane is a composer, sound artist and researcher. Her current interests include how sound relates to the past, our histories, our environment and our collective and individual memories; composing with the spoken word; field recording; listening; and how feminism and gender are manifested within sound art. Aspects of her creative practice have developed out of these interests and include composition and installation-based work with spoken word, field recordings and archive material. Books include 'Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice' (RGAP, 2008) and, with Angus Carlyle, 'In the Field' (Uniformbooks, 2013), a collection of interviews with eighteen contemporary sound artists who use field recording in their work and 'On Listening' (2013) a collection of commissioned essays about some of the ways in which listening is used in disciplines including anthropology, community activism, bioacoustics, conflict mediation, religious studies, music, ethnomusicology and field recording. Her CD The Hebrides Suite was released by Gruenrekorder in 2013. Cathy Lane is Professor of Sound Arts at University of the Arts London and co-directs Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP).
Holly Ingleton is a sound artist and feminist sound studies scholar. She is an Associate Lecturer of Sound Cultures at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London and a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Music Studies at City University London currently completing the research, "Composing Paradoxes: Feminist Process in Sound Arts and Experimental Musics". Holly is the editor of hernoise.org and one of the founding collaborators of Sound::Gender::Feminism::Activism. Recent participation in academic conferences and music festivals include 'Gender, Education, Creativity' in Digital Music and Sound Art, NIME 2014; Feminist Theory and Music Conference, Hamilton College New York, 2013; 'On The Air: Museruole', Women in Experimental Music Festival, 2013; 'Sound/Music/Noise in Performance Art' at Extreme Rituals, Arnolfini Bristol, 2012; Supersonic Music Festival, Birmingham, 2012; Supersonix Conference, Goethe Institute London, 2012.
CRiSAP is a research centre of the University of the Arts London dedicated to the exploration of the rich complexities of sound as an artistic practice. CRiSAP's main aim is to extend the development of the emerging disciplinary field of sound arts and to encourage the broadening and deepening of the discursive context in which sound arts is practised.
"Here are some scores for you to do" is the first in an ongoing collaboration between CRiSAP and Electra departing from materials in the Her Noise Archive. With funding from Creative Vouchers / AHRC.
Image: Still from Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation, 2013. Performers: Rachel Aggs, Peaches, Catriona Shaw, Verity Susman, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, William Wheeler