
13 January 2025
With the body in interaction between the art forms
Based on her own work as a chamber musician, recorder player Kerstin Frödin has investigated musical interpretation from a number of perspectives. Through a series of interdisciplinary performing arts projects, her thesis provides examples of how musicians’ bodily knowledge and creativity can be utilised and contribute to a liberation from traditional roles and hierarchies and break paths to new artistic expressions.
The research project was based on the chamber music ensemble Lipparella and a work by composer Kent Olofsson. Unlike symphony orchestras and choirs, this type of small chamber music ensemble works without a conductor. The musicians have to rely on the group’s internal communication in the form of gestures and glances to find a musical interplay. After a first qualitative analysis of the gestures and non-verbal communication of the ensemble, the research project continued to expand towards an interdisciplinary practice, exploring how the same kind of close interaction can be achieved across the arts.
The performance “What is the word” was realised as a collaboration between Lipparella, director Karl Dunér and composer Christer Lindwall. In addition to a new work by Lindwall, the members of Lipparella performed Samuel Beckett’s poem “What is the word” and “Quad”, a choreographic work in which four “players” move like anonymous game pieces in an eternal pattern across a square drawn on the stage floor. The interaction in these non-musical works revolved around textual phrasing, movement and spatial perspectives, and in many ways resembled the non-verbal interaction of the chamber musician. Reflecting on the project later led to the documentary film “What is the word”, made by Kerstin Frödin in collaboration with filmmaker Tomas Boman.
Collaboration with choreographer
The next investigation was carried out together with choreographer and dancer Åsa Unander-Scharin. The starting point for their collaboration was to develop a work in which music and dance interact on equal terms and where the relationship between the arts was central. Based on this so-called choreo-musical approach, the duo “Fragmente2” was eventually developed, based on the Japanese composer Makoto Shinohara’s solo for tenor recorder “Fragmente”. In “Fragmente2” Kerstin Frödin and Åsa Unander-Scharin interact as choreo-musical figures, i.e. the musician is also choreographed and the dancer contributes to the sounding material in the form of sounds from body movements.
“During the process of developing the dense choreo-musical interaction of the work, we connected the musical fragments of the work with various metaphorical scenes involving both spatial and physical qualities. For example, we are in a corridor, in a park, in other fragments we act as mechanical dolls or surgeons in an operating room. Working with metaphorical scenes like this was a way of creating meaning and contributed to the theatrical and playful character of the work,” explains Kerstin Frödin.
The work of communicating the subjective experience of the actual performance of “Fragmente2” then became an important part of the thesis work itself.
“Through the work with ‘Fragmente2’ I became aware of my physicality in a different way than I had previously experienced. My habitual movement pattern as a musician was combined with choreographic instructions and new bodily impressions. In the thesis, my inside perspective of performing ‘Fragmente2’ is conveyed in the form of a series of poetic reflections.”
Crossing borders in the performing arts
She continued her collaboration with Åsa Unander-Scharin in the larger performing arts work “Conference of the Birds” based on the medieval Persian poet Farid-ud-Din Attar’s poem of the same name and composer Madeleine Isaksson’s recorder solo “Les sept vallées". “The Conference of the Birds” involved several artists and included, in addition to music, electro-acoustic music, dance, video scenography, lighting and costumes. In this work, too, the boundaries between the art forms were partially blurred, the video scenography and the electroacoustic music became additional components of the choreo-musical interplay.
For Kerstin Frödin, working on “Conference of the Birds” meant a further expansion of her own practice when, in addition to an extensive reworking of the musical material, she also composed completely new musical material, tailored to work in the choreo-musical context. The electroacoustic part was then created in close collaboration between her and composer Kent Olofsson.
“My hope is that the doctoral thesis can contribute to the field of experimental performing arts and encourage classically trained instrumentalists and other artists to go beyond the conventions and the expected. To make room for different types of creative exploration in encounter with other artists and art forms.”
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