Creative bodies; embodied creation: performative behaviour and identity as emergent materials for new collaborative works

Sargen, Ellen Lucy (2024) Creative bodies; embodied creation: performative behaviour and identity as emergent materials for new collaborative works. Doctoral thesis (PhD), The Royal Northern College of Music in collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

I instigated this practice-led research project to make a concerted change in my compositional practice and explore how the performers I worked with could be more meaningfully integrated into my pieces and processes as collaborators. By building a community of regular collaborators (mostly working one-on-one), I have led multiple creative projects to critically investigate how the unique behaviour and identity of individuals can be “used” as a compositional material, and how identity can be constructed (and co-constructed) through new compositions and performance. Conceptualising this investigation, and by extension, my music as an ongoing dialogue between myself and the people I work with, the scores and recordings presented in this portfolio and thesis are fragments or tracings of the variously intimate interactions I had with performers around identity. In this thesis I have defined the abstract spaces which have framed these interactions, which I explain using concepts of performativity (Butler, 2015; Butler, 2007; Kondo, 2018; Spatz, 2015) and embodied technique (Spatz, 2015; Spatz, 2016) as well as engaging with critical literature in anthropology and ethnography to analyse how my methods have curated, disrupted, subverted or accelerated these abstract spaces. Participating in this project as a composer and performer, at the beginning of this research (and during the Covid-19 pandemic), I curated a new performance space for myself that was necessarily detached from the structures of the western art music (WAM) concert hall. Having instigated a personal enquiry into my identity as a musician, I created an audiovisual/ ASMR/ experimental piece from the materials of this enquiry that was framed within a politics of spectatorship (formulated through McGrath (2001) and Laing & Willson (2020)). Many of the dialogues I had with other performers subsequently gathered within or around the folds of this reflection, producing materials for composition that I handled through specific scoring and audiovisual methods while undertaking a rigorous critique of my own positionality. This critical and reflexive research expands and integrates composition and performance strategies to creatively harness and construct performer identity on the contemporary WAM stage, within notated and non-notated practices.