Darkroom Performances

Invisible Motifs

 Performance piece for solo show of the same title.

Violin (Mia Thom), Cello (Jessica Scott) and voice (Mia Thom, Jessica Scott), score composed by Lucy Strauss.

Work to be performed in the complete darkness, with sampled photographic dark-room electromagnetic frequencies through multi-channel speaker system.

Full performance: +- 00:15:00

“Instructions such as ‘repeat this rhythm as you wish, keeping a steady pulse’ or ‘repeat until audio cue on speakers’ or ‘choose to play each box when you think
it would be appropriate’ demonstrate a score with a remarkable capacity to accommodate both the room itself and the experience of the performer. As a work in and of itself, it displaces traditional Western musical modes shifting a focus away from the specificities of the discipline of music, to an interest in what Salomé Voegelin calls the sound-music continuum. The continuum (not the hierarchy) of music and noise is consciously exploited to provide a sonic experience rather than a discipline-specific form of ‘understanding.’ Performed in the dark, the work enters another dialogue with the embodied experience of the performers themselves. Added to that the interspersed audience members and the entire concert hall model shatters into a deeply personal encounter with sound, space and body. Situating the performance in darkness activates an awareness of the invisibility of sound, a means of exposing the limits of visual certainty. As Voegelin writes, “The sonic material is the groundlessness of our concrete experience that does not negate the visible but reveals its limits by opening its depth.” (Voegelin. 2014. P87)”

Excerpt from Catalogue Essay by Natasha Norman

Nocturne for a Camera Obscura

Sound Performance at Eclectica Contemporary, Cape Town.

Violin (Mia Thom), Viola (Lucy Strauss), Cello (Jess Scott), Broken Piano (Estelle Roux) and Sampled photographic sounds through multi-channel speaker system. Score by Lucy Strauss.

Full performance: 00:13:09
Performed in total darkness; the condition for a photographic darkroom or camera obscura.

Downwards 

towards a dark curtain 

a room within rooms,

Of and out of time

(the red light still on, hums)

Its voice emerges through our own,

a conversation between bodies 

composed and contingent

in many timbres

human and not

The room like a large instrument;

its walls, permeable,

sounds seeping through

interior and exterior lives 

porous, inseparable

(yours and mine)

Released from the indexible realm of sight

forms unaccustomed

loose their edges,

a state (an intimacy, strange)

We listen now 

to voice-bodies here and unseen;

(the disappearing I)

a polyphony of worlds

gradually exposing,

not by projection

but a tuning in 

The darkened chamber sounds; 

an articulation of the invisible,

that which which lies beneath

of understandings unspoken;

a sonic syntax 

A voice reaches past her mouth, her arms

un-homed yet embodied

a ghostly thing, dream-like

a blind internal notion moving outward 

like nets cast out into the complete night

alone, until it echoes back an unfamiliar intonation 

A question perhaps

which way is which

Mia Thom

Voices from the Darkroom

Voices from the Darkroom, 2017, Graduate Exhibition: Michaelis School of Fine Art BAFA (Hons)

Violin, Cello, Viola and sampled photographic darkroom sounds through multichannel speaker system

Performers: Mia Thom, Sibongile Nyembezi, Lucy Strauss

Score: Lucy Strauss, Mia Thom

Full performance: 00:10:08

Recording of a live performance of my graduate piece called, Voices from the Darkroom. Based on the standing waves within the room, this performance is an interaction between voices, disrupting dichotomies of light and dark, human and non-human, performer and audience.

The performance takes place under the darkroom red light as well as complete darkness.