Part of where you are is where you’ve been. If you aren’t too sure where you are, or if you’re sure but don’t like it, there’s a tendency both in psychotherapy and in literature, to retrace your history to see how you got there.

-Margeret Atwood, Survival.

Part of conception of art is reaching back—looking, as Atwood says, to where we began. In creating Assemblage: A Found Poem, my idea was to sift through the past influences of Modernism and the beginning of the avant-garde, to incorporate the multi-faceted roots that started us in new ideas about text and sound. By searching back to Modernism, and the roles of the modernists, from Gertrude Stein’s hermetic word play, to Ezra Pound’s advice to “Make it new,” to Luigi Russolo and his manifesto The Art of Noises, I began to realize that a collaborative performance based on past ideas could be brought together into a composition that produces something innovative and fresh. I have incorporated those foundational fragments of influence, to produce a new form of poetry/sound that disrupts and delights the senses.

The works I selected in this concert event all contain elements of rhythm, text and movement. Footsteps, electroacoustic sounds, heartbeats, and visual elements work together with words to shape what I term as a “found poem.” I anticipated that the combination of each piece of art into one performance would generate an audio/ visual experience, and that this distinct concert will offer the audience the chance to encounter various forms of inspiration. The pieces are a combination of live performances with pre-recorded pieces/text/voice, and the various mediums offer the audience an arrangement in which to interrogate the creative process.

The combination of songs, images, sounds and film actively involve the spectator in the consumption of, and the production of meaning—the observer/listener uses more than one sense to make sense of what is happening, accumulating meaning through association. The concert intends to interrupt the flow of narrative through montage, or short pieces of sound/text overlapped, and I hope to provide the audience with the opportunity to be “modernised”, and enlightened, by the interplay of art.

Concert Program

Johanna Bundon Echo and the Floating Spar (2008)
multichannel audio and dance performance

Kris Brandhagen Ringmaster (2009)
video and poetry performance

Tatjana Bohme-Mehner Soundsounding (2009)
audio

Beatrix Moersch Spracheofme (2009)
audio

Guiseppe Rapisarda The Day Before (2008)
audio

Andrew Wenaus Chorus (2009)
audio

Sibylle Pomorin Mo(u)vement Track 2 (2002)
audio

15-minute intermission
CD loop of Kelly-Anne Riess’s Poem “On Letters and Poetry”

Kelly-Ann Riess Poetry performance

Andrew Wenaus Cymbals are central (2009)
audio

Mark Zaki Sound Seen (and some not quite) (2002)
audio

Kelly-Anne Riess Eight Blocks (2009)
video

Dale Jonathan Perkins The Cuckoo Burrough (2008)
audio

Andrew Wenaus Chaos Mix (2009)
audio

Sibylle Pomorin Mo(u)vement Track 1 (2002)
audio

Lia Pas Sursurrations (2009)
video

Curated by Tracy Hamon for holophon.ca, 2009