Listen

2020

My Roles:

  • Music, art and animation

Musical notation in this work is stretched beyond orthodox methods by being presented through animation. Animation gives life to the score allowing more room for movement and interpretation. This style of music provides not only a visual of the score to the performers but to the audience as well. Both performers and audience are taking part in audio visual story telling.

As performers, you tell your own version of the story based on the visual and in some cases written cues given through the score. From there the audience then takes the visual and audio cues to make a story that they feel connected to. This connectedness comes from turning the audience into active participants in the process of story telling by including them in the creation of a story unique to the participant.

I wrote these words in February 2020, shortly before WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11th. I was full of confused thoughts about seeing and not seeing, looking and not looking, listening and not listening, what it meant to keep hearing terrifying news about the virus, and how it might feel to hear that kind of news so often one had to learn to stop hearing it (something I, like many others, would discover very soon). I struggled, and still struggle, with the line between staying informed and becoming obsessed, or incapacitated by anxiety. I am fascinated by the multiple understandings of what it is to “see” things (to be perceptive, to hallucinate, to foretell the future …) and I also wanted to think about how this multiplicity in the visual modality relates to sound and listening. The idea that our house is both on fire and under water emerged as a way of capturing a sense of overload, simultaneous global catastrophes that shouldn’t be simultaneously possible but are somehow all happening. Now, on the brink of gradual release from the long period of isolation that was just about to begin when I wrote this poem, the repeated injunction to “come here” has acquired an extra layer of meaning.” - Carrie Jenkins