Call for Performers: Squeezing an orchestra into Panoply Performance Laboratory

No Collective is recruiting performers for a new piece to be performed at the “What is Experimental Music?” concert at Panoply Performance Laboratory on July 25. This piece will be an intervention into the often-taken-for-granted physical relationship between the magnitude of the bodies of performers (+instrument) and the space of performance in music.

The idea is simple: the piece consists in squeezing an ad-hoc “orchestra” of musicians into the small venue of Panoply Performance Laboratory. Performers will stand-by outside the venue, and one by one enter the space and join the performance until the venue is completely and extraordinarily packed. The music will be a short and very simple song/passage that is going to be repeated over and over again until the space is filled up (we will decide what the material is going to be in the next couple of days and let you know). Instruments used by players can be of any kind, as long as it is (more or less) pitched and portable/movable. Singing or whistling is also okay too.

The evening begins at 8pm, and No Collective will be sandwiched between Tom Hamilton who goes first, and Al Margolis who goes after us. We will start around 9pm and go on for about 40 mins or so (but you can choose at which point you want to enter the room–if you don’t want to do much, you can just join after 30 mins, for instance). There will be no rehearsals, since the passage to be performed will be very simple. All that is necessary for you is to decide on your instrument, go through the song/passage on your own before the show, and get to the venue on time.

This particular series at Panoply Lab, curated by composer Brian McCorkle, attempts to ask in a quite literal manner (always a good thing), “what is ‘experimental music’?” It’s an obvious and therefore interesting problematic and has a lot of potential to excavate and examine the discursive platform that supports what many of us do and how we talk about what we do (perhaps simply for a lack of a better term?). In a way, we have decided to stay true to the spirit of the project by taking the concept of “experimental” quite straightforwardly: hence the piece will be an experiment in what happens to the experience of live music when it faces an extreme quantity of bodies within an extreme lack of space. There will be a discussion on the available natures of “experimental music” following all the performances, so if you are interested please stay for that as well.

If you are interested, please contact [email protected] at your earliest convenience.

Even if you cannot participate, we would very much appreciate it if you could pass the word around and/or let us know of anybody in particular who might be interested in the project. We want to get people who will be both interested in the concept and interesting as performers.

Thank you!

No Collective

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No Collective (You Nakai, Jay Barnacle, Ai Chinen, Kay Festa, Earle Lipski, et al.) makes various works that examine and (re)construct different modes of temporalities. Most often these have resulted in music performances which explore and problematize both the conceptual and material infrastructures of music and performance. Other work formats include play scripts, picture books, haunted houses, and dance. Recent works include Vesna’s Fall (Judson Church/Black Mountain College, 2014), a decidedly Modernist dance piece made in collaboration with Lindsey Drury in which each dancer wears a 13 feet movable, curtained stage and counts the necessary counts for other dancers who they cannot see, andConcertos No.4 (National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, 2012), performed with ball­-shaped speakers operated by blind performers in a completely darkened 16,000 square feet performance space; publications include Concertos (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011), a book which describes and prescribes the process of preparation, execution, and documentation of a music concert in the form of a play script, and Sonnet for ‘Concertos No.4’ (National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, 2013), a score of a nursery rhyme whose lyrics are the entire instructions for making a ‘serious’ music concert; curatorial projects include several concerts of the Argentinian composer/choreographer Ellen C. Covito around the world (two in New York co­-curated with Panoply Performance Laboratory and Dreary Somebody respectively). A brief portrayal of No Collective’s activities can be found in an interview with You Nakai by Elizabeth Hoffman (Perspectives of New Music (Winter, 2013)). No Collective also runs the publisher Already Not Yet, which has recently published Ellen C. Covito: Works After Weather (2014). For further information: nocollective.com +alreadynotyet.org