How do you sing a dance? And how do you play a painting? What happens when you ask a choreographer to fashion a new piece of music for soprano and double bass, produced with the tools of her own trade and realized in the world of pitch and timbre? These are the questions that we pursue in our ongoing project forge, an interdisciplinary exploration of creation and translation.
We’ve paired up with choreographer Alyssa Gersony and visual artist Vero Rose Smith to create what we think will be an evening-length performance at the intersection of sound, movement, and canvas. The work samples displayed on the subsequent pages represent the first stage of our artistic process where, by using a kind of exquisite corpse spin off, we were each challenged to translate/transcribe one another’s original work into our own medium. In the resulting four “chains” of work, an original creation underwent three phases of transformation in different media. Our hope was to explore this idea of translation across mediums, tease out any practical/ideological challenges, and begin a conversation about collective creation.
Check out chain one and chain two for examples of this new work.