a body to the world

…combines composition and improvisation and is created in dialog with the projected text. Texts by two philosophers serve as the basis: on the one hand, the phenomenology of Merleau Ponty (1908-1961) with insights into the relationship between the body identified as the ego and the outside world, and on the other, more recent echoes of this current in the work of the US feminist philosopher Judith Butler (1956).

The focus of the concert is on the new piece for cello, sounding objects and electronics a body to the world, which was created in a collaborative process between the composer Henrik Ajax and the cellist Anna Grenzner. On a visual and at the same time acoustic level, an extended instrument is constructed by attaching threads to the cello strings, which expand in the three-dimensional stage space and produce subtle sounds through electronic amplification. On the other side, the strings are connected to sounding objects such as cymbals, which are also manipulated and “played” by the cellist.

The traditionally separate roles of composer and performer will be transformed into a collaboration – the performer will propose sound ideas and contribute the perspective of embodied forms of knowledge from improvisational experience that contribute to the creation of music; the composer will propose formal, structural and material ideas that will be tested, elaborated and combined in the experimental laboratory together with the cellist. He will also take responsibility for the realtime electronic sound design. In this way, a co-constitution of musical and scenic content emerges through a joint process.

Through this cooperation, improvisation and composition enter into a relationship that highlights the spaces between the established categories of thought and creation, while the threads suggest a connection of the body with the world – they make visible a space of relationality, a non-binary space, a space between performer and audience, individual and alterity, self and other.