If this sounds disturbing, that’s because it was and what came across most powerfully was Walshe’s brutal stripping away of the individual’s sense of personal agency, something which cut to the very nature of existence in our technology-saturated world. For instance, in the section that dealt with the systematic exploitation of a teenage pop-star (clearly Britney Spears), Borregaard tied up his shirt into a crop top and performed a routine that referenced the kind of sexualized physical gyrations typically identified with female pop artists. Suffice to say, the piece made enormous demands on Borregaard who fully immersed himself in the role and delivered a performance that stood out as one of the highlights of the festival.
At the same time, he must navigate enormous quantities of spoken text – assembled, in classic Walshe style, from a concoction of buzz phrases derived from the internet and social media – as well as rearranging everyday objects scattered about the stage and occasionally playing the accordion. Written for the Danish accordionist Andreas Borregaard and the Oslo Sinfonietta, the work treats Borregaard as a kind of guinea pig who is forced to act out a range of bizarre choreographies from ballet pirouettes to press-ups. Jennifer Walshe’s PERSONHOOD (28 April) set out to explore what it means to be a person in our current world of hyper-stimulation and subservience to a range of invasive digital technologies. Instead, this article focuses on a selection of concerts that took place on each day of the festival and attempts to give a more detailed account of the works that featured.
The sheer range of concerts meant that it was impossible to cover every event with a level of thoroughness that would do justice to the efforts of the artists themselves. Sticking to the revamped template of previous years under John Harris – involving the careful intersecting of the stylistic and generational differences of Ireland’s new music scene – this year’s festival featured a total of 25 concerts that included 39 world premieres and 10 Irish premieres, essentially managing to supply a constant stream of live new music from midday until midnight for each day of the expanded four-day festival (28 April–1 May). Even though last year’s online version of New Music Dublin heroically managed to maintain the momentum of the festival in recent years, the overwhelming sense of relief amongst composers, performers and audiences at getting back to live music at this year’s edition was palpable.
0 kommentar(er)
