The New Discipline, by Jennifer Walshe

“Theater provides the unique experience of watching the body in real time, inside a story…there is reality occurring in front of viewing eyes, and the combustible mix of reality with what is being presented on stage is enticing and electric.”

— Richard Maxwell, Theater for Beginners

“…I was born with an ectomorphic body, all skin and bones. However, after being inspired by a passage from the diaries of the Pop artist Mr. Andy Warhol – a passage where he expresses his sorrow after learning in his middle-fifties that if he had exercised, he could have had a body (imagine not having a body!) – I was galvanized into action…..Hence, I now have a body.”

— Douglas Coupland, Generation X

“The New Discipline” is a term I’ve adopted over the last year. The term functions as a way for me to connect compositions which have a wide range of disparate interests but all share the common concern of being rooted in the physical, theatrical and visual, as well as musical; pieces which often invoke the extra-musical, which activate the non-cochlear. In performance, these are works in which the ear, the eye and the brain are expected to be active and engaged. Works in which we understand that there are people on the stage, and that these people are/have bodies.

Examples of composers working in this way include: Object Collection, James Saunders, Matthew Shlomowitz, Neele Hülcker, François Sarhan, Jessie Marino, Steven Takasugi, Natacha Diels, myself.

The New Discipline is a way of working, both in terms of composing and preparing pieces for performance. It isn’t a style, though pieces may share similar aesthetic concerns. Composers working in this way draw on dance, theatre, film, video, visual art, installation, literature, stand-up comedy. In the rehearsal room the composer functions as a director or choreographer, perhaps most completely as an auteur. The composer doesn’t have aspirations to start a theatre group – they simply need to bring the tools of the director or choreographer to bear on compositional problems, on problems of musical performance. This is the discipline – the rigour of finding, learning and developing new compositional and performative tools. How to locate a psychological/physiological node which produces a very specific sound; how to notate tiny head movements alongside complex bow manoeuvres; how to train your body so that you can run 10 circuits of the performance space before the piece begins; how to make and maintain sexualised eye contact with audience members whilst manipulating electronics; how to dissolve the concept of a single author and work collectively; how to dissolve the normal concept of what a composition is.

And always, always, working against the clock, because the disciplines which are drawn from have the luxury of development and rehearsal periods far longer than those commonly found in new music. Then again, the New Discipline relishes the absence of that luxury, of the opportunity to move fast and break things. In this way, it is a *practice* more than anything else. And the concomitant: the New Discipline is located in the fact of composers being interested and willing to perform, to get their hands dirty, to do it themselves, do it immediately.






The New Discipline thrives on the inheritance of Dada, Fluxus, Situationism etc but doesn’t allow itself to be written off merely as Dada, Fluxus, Situationism etc. It’s a music being written when Dada, Fluxus, Situationism etc have aged well and are universally respected. It takes these styles for granted, both lovingly and cheekily, in the same way it takes harmony and the electric guitar for granted. As starting points. As places to begin working.

New Discipline works can easily be designated, even well-meaningly ghettoised, as “music theatre”. While Kagel et al are clear ancestors, too much has happened since the 1970s for that term to work here. MTV, the Internet, Beyonce ripping off Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Stewart Lee, Girls, style blogs and yoga classes at Darmstadt, Mykki Blanco, the availability of cheap cameras and projectors, the supremacy of YouTube documentations over performances. Maybe what is at stake for the New Discipline is the fact that these pieces, these modes of thinking about the world, these compositional techniques – they are not “music theatre”, they *are* music. Or from a different perspective, maybe what is at stake is the idea that all music is music theatre. Perhaps we are finally willing to accept that the bodies playing the music are part of the music, that they’re present, they’re valid and they inform our listening whether subconsciously or consciously. That it’s not too late for us to have bodies.

Jennifer Walshe, Roscommon, January 2016

body and music

The relation instrumentalists have with their physical body is of a particular kind. Their body is substituted by the instrument, at least during the performance. All the muscles, the nervous system is dedicated to make this weird keys and holes system that we call a clarinet obey to the sound image the performer wants to transmit.
When this practice lasts for years, to ask a musician to take the instrument out and express him or herself without, is a source of serious difficulties.
As a retired cellist i´ve always considered the instrument to be part of the chain which doesn´t make music but more surely keeps us encapsulated in the net and the chains of duty, control, and conventions (a certain idea of beauty, a repertoire, orchestras, etc.).
It doesn t mean that using the body to produce music necessarily goes into either the direction of Bobby mc Ferrin (substituting the sound of the instruments by the ones of the body) or dance. The body can express many sound activities, either while producing sound, or by the memory of it. By memory i mean that some gestures convey some sounds even if they are produced in silent. Our memory reconstitutes the absent sound. And this effect is of the same nature and importance than the dissociation of the sound and its source provided by the loudspeaker. It is an abstraction, an opening towards broad interpretation, and the substrat for layering and constructing a work.
For that reason i would like to insist on the perversion and the highly problematic usual denominations “music”, “theatre”, “music theatre”, “performance”. I know like everybody else the reasons and the usefulness of these terms, and i´m not claiming the need for a new one. But they are terribly misleading because they isolate phenomenons, an isolation which doesn´t belong to us. I think we are generally analogic in our interpretations, and synesthesic in our perceptions. The example of the memory of the sound given by the look, the example of the instrument that we visualise when we hear its recording shows (among thousands) that our life is entirely depending on this supreme faculty: associating, reflecting, reverberating impressions, perceptions, consciously or not. It has nothing to do with one special field.
The separation of activities, already theorised by Plato, and then generalised in our every day life certainly is part of the source of these conception. “ You shall do one thing only, for the sake of the City”. The ancient idea of the poet, who sings, composes, writes texts and carries the divine voice is pulled back to earth by the social and economic regulations. In other cultures, like central Africa or Thailand, the artistic practice is not reserved to the specialists but can be part of everyday´s life, mixing the sacred, the decorative with the functional and the useful aspects of life.



This synesthesic approach, where our senses and our memory are sollicitated without distinction is certainly a completely underestimated one, even in art.
I´ve been experiencing these ideas in a series of short pieces, called Situations. These pieces use one or two found phrases (slogans, proverbs, aphorisms), a certain physical configuration (one, two three performers), a space (chair, table or nothing, preferably nothing), and use a very traditional notation that can be read by music beginners. They can be performed in any language, with no gender, age etc. considerations.
They float between music, theatre, music theatre, performance, actions, rituals. But they all have in common the importance given to the gestures, the net of significations deployed by them. The different layers (text, situation, gestures) are not necessarily consistent, which connects to the absurdist theatre of the 60´s, with a possible comical effect. However, the musical notation keeps them in a different shape, or texture than the one of theatre, which is the time order: the set of actions is musically organised.
Useless to say that these little pieces (although they are very successful among musicians) still have difficulties to find their perfect performers: a lot of musicians have difficulties to give up with their instrument (their transitional object). Opening the borders of music towards these crossed perceptions (involving maybe the eyes, or the smell, the touch) requires an absence of specific in one specific domain. One must be able to give up with a lot of excellence references in order to find the fine tuning between the fields of action, voice, action, rhythm.
These Situations are very small, very short, and confidential (for a very limited audience and small amount of performers), but i keep looking at them as one of the keys to unlock our categories, our limitations and our absence of bodies.

françois sarhan, feb. 2016