Café Oto, London
22/02/2018 - 23/02/2018
Two evenings of performances of text based scores by Antoine Beuger and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé
Performed by Antoine Beuger, John Eyles, Petri Huurinainen, Alex Mah, Will Montgomery, Artur Vidal and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé
Taking the work of Waeckerlé and Beuger as a starting point, the two evenings will explore the points of transformation and translation between text and sound and present new configurations of voice and musical sound, building on George Oppen’s injunction: “Speak// if you can”.
The first evening
UK launch event for my Ode (owed) to O CD (Wandelweiser, 2017). Three pieces are performed by an ensemble of musicians with long experience of working across text and sound: (Story of), O(hh) and O(nly).
(Story of)
O(hh)
The second evening
A rare UK opportunity to witness the Wandelweiser founder and label boss performing his own compositions. Beuger’s solo performance of keine fernen mehr is followed by an ensemble performance of …of being numerous, a composition built on George Oppen’s influential 1968 eponymous poem “.
... of being numerous, Will Montgomery's table
Emmanuelle Waeckerlé and Artur Vidal's table
A video recording of keine fernen mehr is available here
Carole Finer’s SOUND OUT (Resonance fm, 20/02/2018) is available here
(with Antoine Beuger, Will Montgomery and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé)
This event at café Oto was curated by Will Montgomery and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé with support from the Royal Holloway Poetics Research Centre; the Humanities and Arts Research Institute, Royal Holloway; and the University of the Creative Arts research fund.
Ode (owed) to O double cd (Wandelweiser editon, 2017) is available here and on bandcamp here
Ode to O
A body of work (book, cd, text scores, performances, prints) based upon the infamous erotic novel Story of O, in an attempt to navigate a passage through this difficult literary work and its notorious yet little known history.
The work began as a series of private love letters handwritten by Anne Cécile Desclos to her lover Jean Paulhan. It was first published in French in 1954, under the pen name Pauline Réage, and the official English translation appeared in 1965.