The Kaon’CPT Collective: Building a musical culture of not-in-real-life performance through conducted live comprovisation

In this article we describe a Networked Music Collective for online live performance events. Four characteristics of live performance (bodies, space and time, musical culture and social process) are identified as the conceptual and technological basis of our approach. Our recent distributed comprovisation, Perripplayear, is used to illustrate these concepts and to describe the technology stack we employed. The Kaon’CPT collective uses diverse instrumentation including acoustic and electronic instruments, voice and digital musical instruments (DMIs). Its members span 12 time zones and their comprovisation is conducted via a custom distributed score.

A Dramaturgy of Death: Performing (And Spectating) Filial Piety in Early China

This essay analyzes the early Chinese elite discourse on filial death rituals, arguing that early Chinese texts depict these rituals as performance events. Building on spectacle of xiao sacrifices in the Western Zhou Dynasty, Eastern Zhou authors conceived of filial death rituals as dramaturgical phenomena that underscored not only what needed to be performed, but also how it should be performed, and led to an important distinction between personal dispositions and inherited ritual protocol. This distinction, then, led to concerns about artifice in human behavior, both inside and outside the Ruist (Confucian) tradition. By end of the Warring States Period and in the early Western Han Dynasty, with the embracement of artifice in self-cultivation, the dramatic role of the filial son in death rituals became even more developed and complex, requiring the role of cultivated spectators to be engaged critics who recognized the nuances of cultivated performances.

Creativity, autonomy and Dalcroze Eurhythmics: An arts practice exploration

This paper investigates the impact of Dalcroze Eurhythmics on fostering creativity and autonomy in classical instrumental pedagogy. The research took the form of an arts practice investigation which included devising, rehearsing, performing and documenting two performance events, drawing on Dalcroze Eurhythmics techniques rather than conventional classical music approaches. Autoethnography and other arts-based methods were utilised to develop and gather data. The paper presents an overview of Dalcroze Eurhythmics from the perspective of a performer, namely this researcher, and discusses how the method informed my arts practice investigation. It concludes with a discussion on key findings around creativity and autonomy, and the proposal that this approach has the potential to greatly enhance students experience of performance music education, as well as improve performance quality and satisfaction in their ensuing professional careers.

Panarchy 3: River of the Sea

The article reflects critically on Panarchy 3: River of the Sea, a learning-disabled-led ecological performance project that evolved in connection with the River Clyde from 2018 to 2019. River of the Sea was a collaboration between The Panarchy Projects at the University of Glasgow and the Friday Club at the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow. The Friday Club is a learning-disabled theatre group with fifteen members that meets once a week to socialize and develop performance skills, and The Panarchy Projects are an ongoing series of neurodivergent-led, ecological, and theatre-based research projects. The article introduces the exploratory praxis of the River of the Sea project, which combines theatre practice as research method with participatory action research methods within an expanded ecological field. It then analyses the findings, insights, and accounts of experience which were generated through this praxis and shared in two very different performance events. The article ends by discussing these findings, suggesting that learning-disabled-led ecological performance practices, such as those explored in the River of the Sea project, can support aesthetic experimentation, and nurture solidarity. The article hopes to contribute to the development of what Alison Kafer has called a “cripped environmentalism” (131), and to the building of a bridge between learning disability and environmental discourses.

Bodies Out of Time

My research into the exciting realm of participatory theatre examines the centrality of the body as a vehicle for experiencing dynamic performance events. I sought to investigate how embodied participation means in such experiences by discovering a way to study its relation to generating, recording and transmitting knowledge. To do this I generated a theory of temporal embodiment which reveals temporality as key to the affective potentiality participatory performance events can possess. I used this theory to examine various embodied participatory event case studies, including Zuppa Theatre Co’s VISTA20 and UnSpun Theatre’s Lost Together, both of which explicitly theatrical performance events. I then applied Joseph Roach, Diana Taylor and Freddie Rokem’s work on how cultural performances transmit cultural memory and enact culture itself to my theory. Due to my interests in how these cultural processes parallel what my theory of temporal embodiment reveals is at work in explicitly theatrical case studies, I then explore a final, paratheatrical example; Parque EcoAlberto’s Caminata Nocturna. Through these case studies I uncovered complex interrelations that suggest embodied participation has the potential to simultaneously recontextualize, alter or develop both memory and identity and therefore impact action a participant will take in the future. By accommodating these disparate examples, my theory gauges both efficacies and drawbacks of types of embodied participation. This insight reveals the relationship between form/content as integral to the efficacy of a performance event to use to participation to promote future action or change.

Profound Connectivity

Online musical performances in the first few months of the pandemic and lockdown in New York City bring to light the sonic and temporal challenges, unique acoustic space, and aesthetic possibilities of performing on Zoom. The social connection gained through these performance events is the key to their efficacy.