Virtual CONTAQT #3: ROOT BLOOD

Sunday, April 21, 2024

A Virtual Performance

Since 2020, Tina Pearson has worked periodically with ContaQt to explore an intentional practice for creating and performing together online with their traditional instruments. Building on ContaQt’s development of a quality technical set up for playing together remotely, Pearson introduced processes that recognize that we each listen and attend differently through digital and networked spaces, and that those spaces in turn embody unpredictable and unknown qualities.

This virtual performance is in the lineage of Root Blood Fractal Breath, a concert-length piece Pearson made collaboratively with ContaQt in 2017 for performance at the Allan Garden Conservatory in TKaronto. The piece sprung from the idea of uprooting: the accidental and intentional migration of species, including migrations of the musicians’ families from their ancestral lands, in many parts of Europe and Asia, to Turtle Island.

The online version of Root Blood asks the musicians to open their attention toward sensation, touch, breath, and their inner imagination while playing remotely. This creates space for a way of telematically perceiving, listening and responding with each other and with listeners in this elusive networked environment.

Listeners are invited to shift their sense of time and perception by closing their eyes, or using soft focus, allowing their breath rhythm to become relaxed and deeper, and listening peripherally - sensing their own listening space, air, body, and imaginations.

Listening peripherally and expansively to also include what is not audible, the signals that come through the combined wired and telematic connection offers a pathway for the musicians, and the listeners, to inhabit a charged sensing and listening space together.

The virtual performance of Root Blood on April 21, 2024 reflects the contributions and lingering presence of ContaQt member Allison Wiebe, and Wallace Halladay, Rob MacDonald, Alex Kotyk, Bryan Holt, and Louise Campbell who were part of earlier explorations of the piece.

The video background for this performance is from a video score for the multi-media installation “Absorb” by Tina Pearson, commissioned by MediaNet, with videography by Kirk Schwartz.

Tina Pearson especially appreciates the deep attention to telematic process, and the individual sonic stories from ContaQt members Mary Katherine Finch, Sarah Fraser Raff, Andrew Noseworthy, and Jerry Pergolesi.

SPECIAL THANKS TO

The Canada Council for the Arts and the Toronto Arts Council for their funding support.

Special thanks to Evan Ziporyn for inspiration and initial experimentation.

Special thanks to Tina Pearson for guidance in the telematic universe.

Special thanks to Jeff Morton and Wawken Studio for technical support, live sound, audio and video production, and broadcasting.

Additional Technical Assistance by Andrew Noseworthy