Live audio examples Booking information What is the Genetic Choir?
Genetic Choir & Tanja Smit
Two concerts:
Thursday, 10th of January 2013 – as part of the Ephémère series at LOOS
20:30 concert starts – De Constant Rebequeplein 20B, Den Haag
Sunday, 10th of February 2013 – as part of the Toon & Taal Festival in Provadja
15:00 concert starts – Verdronkenoord 12, 1811 BE Alkmaar
tickets/reservations: (072) 520 20 22 – http://www.provadja.nl
Tanja Smit creates drawings based on printed texts in books and newspaper-articles. Printed words become image. The Genetic Choir creates music from fragments of reality around them, for example the sounds they hear in the performance space. Both are exploring structures and patterns that lie hidden underneath the foremost layer of existing things. Smit,´s drawings are in fact graphic scores, asking to be played. The past year Smit and the Choir cooperated in a workshop and some try-outs, with very inspiring results. In this concert, the singers of the Genetic Choir will newly investigate the text scores of which some will be projected for the audience. Together, we will explore the relationship between written words, image, structures and music.
The Genetic Choir is a vocal ensemble that performs concerts without having prepared any music beforehand. The vocalists train themselves as a musical organism, a small human society that interacts in spontaneous sound, becoming music. The music of the Genetic Choir is related to chaos theory, complexity and the self-organizing principles of interrelated nodes in a living network. Genetic Choir compositions create meaning and beauty from seeming randomness, not unlike genes that multiply and mutate, or oscillators that sync with each other after a certain tipping point. Starting point and frame of the compositions can differ per project, but the music always incorporates the reality at hand: the architecture and acoustics of the building, the people present, accidental things that the vocalists hear, sense, smell. In 2012, working with graphic scores and singing compositions on food (taste-scores) have been exciting new developments of the Choir.
Singers in this project: Alexandra de Groot, Amazone Nativel, Anita Kooij, Gabriëlle Barros Martins, Hans Paape, Jeannette Huizinga, Marjolijn Roeleveld, Peter Huber, Tanaquil Schuttel, Thomas Johannsen, Yinske Silva
Tanja Smit is a Dutch visual artist who, apart from images, works with language and music. After finishing studies painting and drawing at the KABK she started up her artist´s practice in The Hague and later moved to Barcelona, Spain, where she resided 16 years. Since 2009 she is based again in The Hague. Her “textimages” consist of simple, repetitive manual interventions that show underlying and new structures and meanings of thetext, and are drawn directly upon it. They have been showed in exhibitions on display tables, by means of projections or reprints on banners.Their use as scores started in 2006 with a cooperation with composer Christopher Williams and the ensemble Chronophonie from Freiburg, Germany. In 2009 her work was part of “Possibility of Action, the Life of the Score”, an historic exhibition on graphic scores in Barcelona´s MACBA museum. www.tanjasmit.com
In the Netherlands she cooperates on a regular basis with composer/performer Anne Wellmer and a small group of composers/performers united in MILE, the Music In Language Ensemble. The cast and size of MILE differs depending the occasion. Next to Wellmer and Smit participants have been Orlando Aguilar, Jelte van Andel, Ángel Faraldo, Marie Guilleray, Anne La Berge, Mateo Marangoni, Sandra Pujols and Cora Schmeiser. In the cooperation with the Genetic Choir the emphasis lies on the improvisatory and harmonic aspects of the scores.
Thomas Johannsen is founder of the Genetic Choir and works as interdisciplinary performer and director on the boundaries of music, dance and theatre. For more of his work see: www.thojoh.com
He initiated a regular research+training space in Amsterdam, which is run by the international community of improvisers: “The Carpet Sessions” are inviting professionals of any discipline to share their work, train their craft and conduct research projects on improvisation. He facilitates the improvisation.wiki , which is meant as a growing wikipedia for improvisation principles and concepts.
You can find two live recorded examples of this collaboration on our website: one is the audio recording of “Olin” (see top of this page or on our audio page) – another is the visually enhanced live video of “Los Abogados” performed at the Toon&Taal Festival in Provadja (see below).
the Genetic Choir blog 