Century FC
Phil Minton
A 100 strong Feral Choir of people who’ve never improvised with their voices before, conducted by composer Phil Minton.
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A 100 strong Feral Choir of people who’ve never improvised with their voices before, conducted by composer Phil Minton.
Location: between: the abandoned site of Parker House (ex-council office building) that became a student accommodation regeneration project, off the Dudhope roundabout; Bell Street Car Park entrance ramp and; the awkward (and otherwise used/ used otherwise) space left over between the back of Tesco’s and DW Sports on the Murraygate.
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.
A guitar solo of frugal wringing, of notes in the dark, an attitude of making everything count.
By focusing on the things that most people don’t notice or pass by uncaring – Steve Roden crafts gentle, sparse and metaphorically loaded compositions.
Instead of the one-way monologue of normal performance, what would be the result of an actual collective dialogue? Where would it go?
How can we imagine bodies not as an end in themselves, but as a medium through which we can become one another’s means?
Part old-fashioned Renaissance man, part hardcore avant-gardist, the Canadian painter-photographer-filmmaker-musician gives full vent to his genius in the exhilarating perceptual vaudeville, named after the ‘central region’ of tissue that acts as a conduit between the brain’s two hemispheres.
Long Stringed Instrument performance involving up to 100 wires strung in tension over a 40m arch.
Quartet improvisation by Klaus Filip – laptop, Radu Malfatti – trombone, Sean Meehan – snare & cymbals, Taku Unami – rice and dish.
The films in the programme take the essential and fundamental building blocks of cinema (combining sound and image through time) screw about with them, interrogate them and cast them anew.