The Love of Being Lost in Anonymity

the setting:

This piece was written for BlackBox Ensemble, and workshopped at Avaloch Farm Music Institute. It premiered in December 2021 at Grace & St. Paul’s Church in NY, NY. I composed the work, played flute in it, sang in it, and recorded voice recordings for the fixed media.

the story:

Initially planned for our 2020 season and postponed due to COVID, we began workshopping this piece at Avaloch Farm in August 2021. Approaching the process as a composer, choreographer, flutist and dancer, we played with a set of choreographed improvisation exercises I made based on a series of chords. Experimenting with the performers both individually and collectively as an ensemble, a crucial part of the creation process was their feedback and perspectives, which I ended up incorporating into the piece in the form of techniques, imagery, emotional/visual aids, etc. As a performer well-versed in the area of contact improvisation within dance, I aimed to recreate this special improvisational experience in sound. Each time it may be slightly different in relational timing, but always comes from the same notated sonic foundation.

Sound is/has its own somatic space. I pulled a series of choreographic terms from an ever-growing list called “Aspects of Composition” as starting points in those individual meetings. Together, we brainstormed sonic forms of responses to those terms. A dance often has subsets of different combinations of dancers, i.e. a solo, pas de deux, pas de trois, full cast, etc. They put a lens on the lattice of the ensemble, the inner-workings contributing to a whole. They bring to light the relationships between individual performers, constantly reframing the sonic dialogues. It’s filled with variations of both dance and music ensemble configurations - solo, quartet and pas de deux - keeping a constant state of flux among the performers, allowing them to evaporate and emerge, come in and out of anonymity. Though there is physical moving involved, it is as much about that as it is the physicality of sound, the sonic dance from their stillness. Each performer will shift between surfacing and retreating back into anonymity. Rather than being declarative about it, it’s done subtly, constructing back up the rest of the world that blurs us into the world of passersby. They are constantly changing perception of physical and sonic relationships with different players.

The Love of Being Lost in Anonymity is inspired by the general context of feeling anonymous within NYC, and a specific story that especially brought this urban, New-Yorkian phenomenon to light. The latter is expressed in a diary entry I wrote right after it happened and later recorded with myself reciting the words, serving as transitions between each movement, projected in the performance space. The piece also represents a stage of revitalization and rebirth in both my personal and creative lives at the time it was written.

The piece is divided into a Prelude, Postlude and three movements in between - three shades of the same color - which embody not only sections of music, but also a literal meaning of three varied physical configurations in which the performers play. The trajectory of the piece is ultimately guided by these formations as well as the vocal line(s), which operate in a form of flexible, meditative plainchant. At the end of the Postlude, the vocalists’ pitch represents surfacing from anonymity, while the ensemble’s spoken white noise is the sea of anonymity. Each movement is framed in both mind and body, with sound connecting them.

Text:

There’s being held and holding on.

Seen you cry in all the ways.
(So never just another.)

Something in my mind.
Held, holding onto yesterday.
This public place of private moments.

Getting lost anywhere.
Where it felt most found.
A world within the world out there.

Living a story anonymously
Among billions…a luxury.

Where only we know the two sides.
To the rest, mindlessly walking somewhere new. You know I’m retracing steps from somewhere else.

Steps towards (,) away. Tomorrow, today, yesterday. Take your pick.

Always a story behind someone carrying flowers.
An everyday motion or a glacial pause.
No second thought or a daggered wound needing gauze. Invisible or blinding, forgetting or reminding.
Take your pick.

Should it be allowed to stick.
With me wherever I am.
Even when somewhere there, and here I am. The world where it is.
Here we are.

A dance never unlearned.

A sound never unheard.

Just there.

Certain steps, we feel the dance. Others walk on our stage, by chance.

Anywhere.

-Annie Nikunen