SISTEMA
12-15th July 2018
Teatro Municipal Baltazar Dias | Centro Cultural John dos Passos | Fórum Machico
Madeira Island
12-15th July 2018
Teatro Municipal Baltazar Dias | Centro Cultural John dos Passos | Fórum Machico
Madeira Island
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If we think of a system as a group of cohesively interrelated elements, then, depending on the temporal and spacial framing, anything can be a system!
These types of considerations have been a focal point in the culture of production, conception and critique of the New Maker Ensemble. This time, sistema (system) has served as a starting point for all the work developed in this project, from the new music programme, to the complementary educational activities. The way we challenged the various creators, we also challenge you to think of systems: where are they? how are they created? how are they useful? how do they work? what do they tell us? how do they constitute themselves? what are they made of? how do they manifest themselves? what do they produce? how complex or simple are they? how do they evolve? what direction do they have? how are they part of us? what autonomy do they have? how are we part of them? etc. |
poster design by Mariana B. Camacho
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WORKSHOPS
Additionally to the concert programme, the NME directors Rodrigo B. Camacho and Sara Rodrigues delivered two days of workshops where the participative piece Circular Exclusion was developed, along with exercises that helped the participants further their understanding on the systems underlying the concerts' programme. |
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images by Rui Camacho
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A microscopic insight on whichever piece of common fabric opens up extremely complex and intricate worlds, which nevertheless are usually based on some form of binary language; not so different from the one computers are built upon.
This piece is the product of the translation of one of these universes into sound. From the binary language, there emerge patterns discernible to the naked eye - or to the rough ear - whose construction commands the wider changes in the harmonic structure. Despite that, the basic nature of the binary code gives the performance an apparent simplicity, which allows for a more contemplative appreciation. As if on a loom, the two performers enlace their arms meditatively on a sole keyboard, and weave - after the same structure - a new piece of fabric; a musical one this time. |
Sara Rodrigues (piano)
Rodrigo B. Camacho (piano) |
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"Examination of a Free Person" (2018)
by Barnaby Goodman premiere Western art music has gone through a long industrialisation process, especially strong during the last two centuries. The conservatoires began emerging a bit everywhere in all European capitals, advancing their standards for the international normalisation of culture.
There come the ever more sophisticated curriculums, the exams, the classifications, the certificates and diplomas. Culture becomes objectified and gets capitalised. A given reified musical language finds its grammar crystallised, serving as a perfect ideal - both in terms of form and content - frozen in time. No one has actually thought longitudinally about sustainability or cultural relevance and that's how all this gets stuck in the absurdity of quantitative evaluation systems, without a proper cultural memory and sensitivity. What place can error, failure have today when someone genuinely attempts to read something at first sight? authenticity is terminally ill. |
Ragnar Árni Ólafsson (examiner)
Roxanna Albayati (cello) |
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Around Music (2006 / 18)
by Cecília Arditto adaptation Terms such as "absolute music", or "abstract music" can be seen as dialectical responses to major philosophical systems, which were influential in central Europe during the mid 19th century. Music - in these people's minds - should therefore be an art form, free and independent from everything else. It should only respond to its own laws and, for bearing an essentially pure and formally perfect nature, any produced discourse would prove incorruptible.
The interest of any musician subscribing to this thought ghetto, should, above all, in the abatement and suppression of any noise, sonic and visual, but also semantic and political. In the moment each piece finds itself realised, only that which most resembles the imagined formal ideal must survive! However, in each concert there always happens a number of things which are not music in those terms. People have solely learned how to ignore them. |
Marat Ingeldeev (piano)
Roxanna Albayati (cello) Rodrigo B. Camacho (percussion) Nicole Trotman (flute) Ragnar Árni Ólafsson (guitar) Sara Rodrigues (text projection) |
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The space starts off as a blank slate. It is silence. Stretched across the room, there are lines, visible and invisible, which create divisions, like those of a house. Before everyone's eyes, there gradually is built a structure in which, divided and subdivided, space merges into organised time.
Performers, fragmented as well, execute choreographies whose gestures respect the size of divisions containing them, whilst the compartments themselves, growing ever smaller, shrink gestural timeframes, making them ever shorter, more rapid and detailed. The visual counterpoint from all the silent gestures is music too, although it has no sound. The inverse pathway is then followed back to a time where there were no constructions to be seen, after lines, one by one, are erased, delivering space back to silence anew. |
(movement / percussion)
Sara Rodrigues Nicole Trotman Marat Ingeldeev Roxanna Albayati Rodrigo B. Camacho Ragnar Árni Ólafsson |
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The machine asks the musician for sound, so, the musician offers it some. The machine receives it gladly for it needs it in order to do its job, which consists in spectrally analysing it, so that - allowed some creative freedom - the generation of a series of notes rapidly begins, inspired in the harmonic universe of the sound it captured.
The musician receives the message whilst its being produced in real time and promptly gets ready to interpret it. From this point onwards, all sound becomes more fuel to the computational fire. Eventually, human and machine become indistinguishable, as both execute a function, so necessary to prevent the cycle from breaking. Both sustain and develop it, simultaneously challenging it and raising the ever more intense performance levels. Could this be an old form of love? |
Marat Ingeldeev (piano)
Desmond Clarke (Pd patch) |
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The words we hear are the same, which gave the played music its origin. The text has been processed by a system which, according to strict rules, interpreted each of the word and transformed them into musically organised sounds. It so happens that, akin to an instructions book, the text explains how the translation system actually works.
We are granted access to the piece's interior as much we gain a vision into its pre-existing state and on the nature of its projected product. We become able to precisely understand its structure and it is exactly this type of conceptual clarity that constitutes this piece as a glass-casked machine. Every time it is put to work, it explains itself whilst it sheds light on the moment of its own conception. |
Rodrigo B. Camacho (percussion and voice)
Roxanna Albayati (cello) |
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Afflicted with issues to do with sustainability, the author has decided to submit herself and three other performers to a longitudinal process of self-questioning. It follows that the obvious question was formulated from a negative stand point and so produced such a bewildering multidimensionality, as soon as each performer had to think about that which they consider unsustainable at global, national, local and private levels.
As the process unfolded in a semi-emergent fashion, a performance was built, aimed at different audiences, whose involvement in the same self-questioning process is expected. In this sense, the value of multi-dimensionality does not stay locked within the research work. It lives also during the performance, in which the way the information is communicated changes according to a scale of various levels of clarity. From the more abstract, or even poetic, to the completely explicit ways of telling someone something, the same messages get transmitted in differently. With this, the author wants to discover in which ways we can produce behavioural positive change through performance art. |
with mixed media and projections
(voice / movement) Ragnar Árni Ólafsson (guitar) Nicole Trotman (flute) Rodrigo B. Camacho Sara Rodrigues |
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There are myriad ways to cause terror and so, plenty of different forms of terrorism. There is terrorism that cares for the technical quality of its own performance and is especially zealous in all which concerns aesthetical production. At the end of the day – and this applies to any case that there may be – there is always a message to be sent across, through spectacular acts, in a quest for the widest possible audience. There is that kind of terrorism, which invariably jumps out of the niche and, just like a limelight-drunk moth, has visions of becoming a pop start.
There is terrorism that worries about authorship and lays a signature on anything reachable, from scribbles to magna opera, since it even shows a petty interest for archiving, and scrupulously crafts its own biography, glimpsing at the remote possibility of one day coming to see it published inside a leather cover. There is a tiny drop of terror in arousing the ism that lives in us, that very flame, which devours our insides before any intolerable injustice, shakes our agreeable stance, and washes from our minds any kind of decency. There burns our blood and through our head, a toast to nihilism is summoned in the most Russian way conceivable. |
with projections
(voice / movement) Roxanna Albayati (cello) Marat Ingeldeev (piano) Nicole Trotman Rodrigo B. Camacho Sara Rodrigues Ragnar Árni Ólafsson |