PROJECT // imaginary music
My residency is a two-week research process, gathering a group of dancers to develop new performance proposals that join music/sound making and choreography. Working with musical instruments, our bodies and the space, we will develop group music-making practices that treat sound making, listening and moving as a unified practice.
I am at the very beginning. Sometimes I like to begin by revisiting something of the past–– a score, a piece of music, an object, or a particular historical moment, wondering about that thing, and orienting to a moment of utopia or particular vision. In this residency I plan to invite my collaborators and I to reinterpret pre-existing music-making traditions, techniques and sound healing modalities to create and re-create new, imaginative forms of music together.
If sound is always already social (always occurring in-between and in relation to the other things, other people), then maybe the process of learning music could be approached as an experiment in group transformation. How does music change us? These are some things I’m interested in.
BIO // Christopher Willes is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, dramaturge, and facilitator based in Toronto and Montreal. His work focuses on the subject and practice of listening, to explore issues of sociality, collectivity, agency, materiality, and perception in music/sound, performance, art and life. He has made large-scale performances, exhibitions, concert works, recordings, publications, digital artworks, he organizes community arts projects and facilitates workshops. His artistic projects are often collaboratively created through processes that seek to blur the lines between art making, learning, performance, process, and publication. The aesthetics and politics of a collaborative process, conflict and care, audience positionality and participatory forms are other recurring themes in his work that he cares deeply about. Christopher is an associate artist and producer with Public Recordings, and has also worked in dance and theatre as a dramaturge and sound designer for over a decade. He studied Music at the University of Toronto and he received an MFA from the Bard College. He is currently studying Conflict Mediation at the University of Waterloo.
DETAILS //
Collaborators for this residency include Winnie Ho, Ellen Furey and Brendan Jensen.
This project is being created with support of Public Recordings (publicrecordings.org)