Improbable Dance

SOUNZ Virtual Concert

Michael Norris’s ‘Timedance’ is a collaboration with choreographer/filmmaker Daniel Belton. JS Bach’s Suite No. 2 in B Minor is deconstructed by way of stretching, elasticising, looping and the overlaying of modern harmonies so that the Bach is rendered “almost subliminal.” The work was a finalist in the 2013 SOUNZ Contemporary Award.

Gillian Whitehead’s SOUNZ Contemporary Award-winning ‘The Improbable Ordered Dance’ follows. Gillian writes:

“In his 1974 collection ‘The lives of a Cell’, Lewis Thomas wrote a memorable essay devoted to the spectrum of sound made by all living creatures. He believes that as well as producing sounds in every possible way to send messages to their own kind, all creatures have the urge to make some kind of music. The rhythmic sounds emitted by all creatures might, Lewis suggests ‘be the recapitulation of something else – an earliest memory, a score for the transformation of inanimate random matter in chaos into the improbable ordered dance of living forms.’ It was this essay, together with my fascination in the rediscovery of the part of Auckland I knew as a young child, that have shaped this piece.”