Upcoming talk on music, dance, and nonhuman systems (Faculty of Music, Cambridge)

On Wednesday 14th October, I’ll be speaking about music, dance, and nonhuman systems as part of the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Music’s colloquium series. Here’s the abstract for my talk:

Hearing and Feeling Systems in Contemporary Composition and Choreography

This talk asks us to think recent musical composition and contemporary choreography together. It does this in order to identify how both performance disciplines share critical relationships with nonhuman (technological, ecological…) systems. I propose that much contemporary composition and choreography can be understood to occur in relation to a world taken, at its heart, to be complexly interconnected and relational – a sense reinforced in everything from readily evident climate breakdown, to the flows of and frequent disturbances to global trade, to digital systems’ integration into almost all aspects of daily life.

It is here that music and dance offer something: they enable us to more acutely feel – and critically navigate difficult and ambiguous feelings about – this contemporary world, a world that has increasingly become understood to be itself comprised of complex, interpenetrating systems.

I propose that, in their emphasis on exploring how experience is structured and mediated, critical and psychoanalytic theory offer some ways for making sense of what it means to live in, and feel, our systemic world, as well as how these challenges are tended to in contemporary works of music and choreography. To demonstrate the efficacy of this approach, and to elaborate some initial findings, the talk principally makes use of work developed from psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott. Specifically, I consider how systems – in music and dance, as well as in everyday life – might provide environments that “hold” us in various ways and, in so doing, enable fuller or more impeded modes of experience and subjective aliveness vis-a-vis today’s “systems-world”