Nourishing Entangled Modes of Engagement
The roles of five key actants—the composer, score, performer, audience and space—lie at the heart of Alison Isadora’s PhD Performing the Ecology of a Composition-Practice-in-Becoming.
The research evolved through a dialogue between the academic and the compositional and is concerned with interrogating the entangled relationships between the above actants in Western new music and nourishing new dialogues between them.
Extending on Isabelle Stengers’ work on the ecology of practices, modes of engagement are developed that might foster alternative roles for all actants (human and other-than-human), within a dynamic, co-constituting environment.
For instance:
- the entangled composer who co-ordinates, initiates, co-creates, hosts and acts as guardian;
- the recontextualized score which operates as an adaptive (notation) environment;
- the implicated musician whose role may be expanded to include co-creator, teacher, and organiser;
- the agential audience who may be an attuned listener, participant, and co-creator; and
- the situated performance space.
Integral to the research is a body of original compositions that generate expanded notions of the actants’ roles and shared compositional ‘response-ability’. In herTogether series Isadora explores different forms of intra-actions, between the actants. If we accept that these roles are created together, and that this is an on-going process, what does this mean for how we work together, for aesthetics? Isadora will discuss the implications this way of thinking might hold through showing excerpts of works from the series. Methods investigated include composing the situation, collective, embodied listening practices, co-creation, audience scores and feedback moments.
