Touch Transmission: Four Hands
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RCH/003, Ron Cooke Hub, Campus East, University of York (Map)
Event details
ALL WELCOME
My current research project, ‘Musical Touch and Vicarious Perception’, examines the dynamics of touch in performer-instrument interactions: touching instruments, how the instrument ‘touches back’, and feeling ‘touched’, affectively. It also explores how performer touch operates vicariously, contributing to audiences’ felt experience. The research is taking place primarily through collaborative contemporary performance-making, but this draws on, and also contributes to, phenomenological enquiry and empirical research in embodied perception.
The practice research uses experimental and improvisatory processes to disrupt intuitive musical touch, intervening creatively to expose and scrutinise its operation. For this seminar I will focus on the process towards a performance piece, Four Hands, for piano and two performers (incorporating text, movement and electronic sound), devised collaboratively with theatre maker Teresa Brayshaw. We explored musical touch in terms of resonance and interference, through – on, in, and around – the piano. As (nominally) a pianist and a ‘non-pianist’, we wanted to explore touch as a sonic-affective interface: between performers, between performers and things (the various objects of performance), and perhaps between performer(s) and audience. How can tacit, felt experience of musical touch be transferred between bodies? In the piano context, how does (sonic) resonance resonate (kinaesthetically, in the other).
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About the speaker
Catherine Laws is a pianist working primarily in new music and interdisciplinary performance. She regularly performs and records piano and ensemble music by living composers – most recently Paul Whitty, David Prior, and Annea Lockwood. However, her main creative focus involves working in close collaboration with composers, sound artists, theatre makers and film makers to devise new interdisciplinary performance pieces exploring aspects of body and identity in performance. Recent projects include her 75-minute solo multimedia piece, Player Piano, developed with composers Edward Jessen, Annea Lockwood, Roger Marsh, and Paul Whitty, theatre maker Teresa Brayshaw, and film maker Wendy Kirkup, followed by a series of related ‘piano films’ with Minyung Im, all available on vimeo. Her books include Voices, Bodies, Practices: Performing Musical Subjectivities (Leuven, 2019) and Performance, Subjectivity, and Experimentation (Leuven, 2020) and her videos can be found on vimeo. Catherine is a Professor of Music at the University of York and a Senior Artistic Research Fellow at the Orpheus Institute, Ghent.
Venue details
Wheelchair accessible