Composer/Performer Collaboration
the body becomes the landscape
by Benjamin Portzen, performed by Nolan Ehlers
The Body Becomes the Landscape emerged from a desire to explore how deeply, even subliminally tied the performer’s body could be to a piece, and the ways in which the physical act of performance could augment an audience’s experience of the musical material itself. The piece, therefore, is derived equally from specific choreographies “projected” onto the gong rack through performance, and musical ideas translated into choreographies through the specific arrangement of gongs on the performance surface. Over the piece’s course, I imagined the body slowly disintegrating through and into the musical-choreographic material. It is this disintegration – the collapse of a body and the sense of loss it provoked in me – in which the emotional world of The Body Becomes the Landscape finds its shape.
