Carolyn Chen – Music for bodies
Games of listening, moving, listening through moving – requiring no particular training or instruments. Warm-up exercises drawn from aikido, tai chi, contact improvisation, Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed. Tuning meditation, lip-reading confessions, flocking and muting, and hacked games of three-legged races, wheelbarrows, tag, human pyramids, steering and directing the bodies of others. Cooperation, competition, and contact. Discuss how listening, movement, and sound-making interact in various contexts and varying degrees of proximity, and workshop pieces by the group.
In the framework of Symposium Sound & Participation.
Carolyn Chen has made music for supermarket, demolition district, and the dark. Recent projects include a marble chase and a commission for Klangforum Wien. Her work has been presented in 23 countries and described by The New York Times as “the evening’s most consistently alluring … a quiet but lush meditation.” Her decade-long studies of the guqin, the Chinese 7-string zither traditionally played for private meditation in nature, has informed her thinking on listening in social spaces. Recordings are available on Perishable, the wulf., Quakebasket, and Play It Forward. She earned a PhD in music from UC San Diego, and an MA in Modern Thought and Literature and BA in music from Stanford University, with an honours thesis on free improvisation and radical politics. www.carolyn-chen.com
FEE : symposium: free / workshops: 20 euro each, on registration only (eveline@q-o2.be)
open forum: free, proposals (julia@q-o2.be) by February 1st.
