Alwynne Pritchard & Jennifer Torrence
6th October.
About the concert:
In a development of her Audioglimt concert from November last year, Alwynne Pritchard is joined by Oslo-based percussionist Jennifer Torrence. Together they will perform to the same extract from film of Meredith Monk’s Quarry from 1977, which Pritchard used last year, and about which she says the following:
Meredith Monk believes in the healing power of art. I'm not sure I do. Neither am I sure that being healed would be very useful to me as artist. Do we need healing? Is pain a bad thing? Is art a good thing? I don't know the answers to these questions. In the face of them and much of what I do, it is the writer Haruki Murikami's statement that 'a heavy silence that defies words exists inside me' that resonates most powerfully. However, like Monk, I'm fascinated by the human voice, its relationship to movement and expressive potential. For this reason, her work is interesting to me as performer, however radically different it is from my own. And using my voice to create an alternative audio track to extracts from her 1977 stage piece “Quarry” presents me with a direct, practical and enriching way to address what it is I find both compelling and problematic about this piece.
About Alwynne Pritchard:
Alwynne Pritchard is a British performer, composer, artist and curator, based in Bergen. In her music and performances, Alwynne explores relationships between musical expression and the human voice and body. She has appeared as an actor, vocalist and physical performer in a number of stage productions, as well as directing and developing choreography for her work. In 2015, she formed the music-theatre company Neither Nor with her partner Thorolf Thuestad.
Alwynne has composed for, and performed with, leading musicians and ensembles across the globe. Her work Decoy, created at the Heinrich Strobel Stiftung in Freiburg in 2006, for the Donaueschingen Musiktage, was awarded the special prize given by the Foundation Ton Bruynèl, STEIM and the Foundation GAUDEAMUS. In 2016, Alwynne was awarded the commission to create a fanfare or ‘marker’ to celebrate the opening of Snøhetta’s building for the University of Bergen’s newly created Department of Art, Music and Design, for which she created the book of text scores, up without an insistent casting away.
Alwynne’s professional life has also included stints as a writer and presenter for BBC Radio, a composition teacher at Trinity College of Music in London and as Artistic Director of both the Borealis festival and BIT20 Ensemble.
About Jennifer Torrence:
Jennifer Torrence is an Oslo-based percussionist, performer, musician, researcher specializing in contemporary music.
