Reseach & Performance at Countdown Grabowsee (2024)

A Tuned Body is both performance and methodology – the performed work is, in fact, a vessel for the methodology. It began as a speculation on the gradients between ‘self’ and ‘other.’ As two collaborators whose work focuses on queer, ecological, affectual relationships, we wanted to devise a methodology that enables us to fluctuate between being two cooperating individual bodies and one shared, coordinated body. The result is a meditation practice we call ‘tuning’ – a term borrowed from Tim Morton’s All Art is Ecological (2021) – in which we align our bodily and environment awareness and movement. Then, donning multi-wearer garments we created, we inhabit a shared skin – a vessel in which multiple individuals become organs in a composite organism.

As a performance, A Tuned Body is a movement and sound piece, dramatizing both the process of tuning as well as the maturation cycle of the composite organism. After turning together, performers inhabit the skins co-become the new, coordinated body. The progression of movement illustrates the exploration of a young creature in the world. Movement builds upon itself as the organism learns its body’s capabilities. In the performance context, we collaborate with Julie Stamm and others in researching, scoring, and performing this movement. We center improvisation, with the tuning methodology as the container for the score.

With sound artist Scott Carver, we researched working with microphones and voice modulation written in Supercollider code to design a voice for the organism. The resulting sound plays through Carver’s handmade 14-channel surround sound system, engulfing the performers in a cocoon of their own noises. When two or more voices inside the skin merge into the texturized, scintillating, echoing composite voice, the sensation of duet slowly melts into the sensation of soloing. The organism’s sonification not only enhances the otherworldly experience of co-becoming, but also pulls the coder/musician (Carver) into the shared body as yet another organ. As the organism matures, learning its own voice and mind, its sound evolves from breathing, to harmonizing, pre-verbal expression, to utterances of verbalized self-awareness.

When we first began research with performing in multi-body costumes, at the DIY arts residency and festival Countdown Grabowsee in August 2024, we noticed and received feedback of a connective audience experience. Set in the round, with the audience free to move and modulate the space around the performers, a third body knit itself into form; the audience responded as organs that cooperate as tuned whole, shifting around in the third skin of the built and sonic environment. This transformation of performer vs. audience into a smooth and organic system underscored our need for deeper research and reiteration.