Live arts correspondent Bella Todd on the hottest happenings in the global cultural calendar this week, including a sound installation to tweet about in Chicago and Charlie Chaplin’s daughter in London...
The Main Event: Andrew Bird’s Sonic Arboretum
What is a bird’s beak but an ornate natural speaker system, and what is a musical speaker but a man-made beak? Anyone who’s seen whistling violinist, live-looping lover and all-round beautiful geek Andrew Bird play live is likely to have had their curiosity sparked by the exquisitely shaped 27-inch horn (stop giggling at the back please) he uses to amplify his violin. And this year it has taken centre stage in a piece of performance art that’s part indie gig, part sound installation.
Sonic Arboretum, which premiered at New York’s Guggenheim this summer and surfaces again this week in a developed form at Chicago’s Museum Of Contemporary Art, is a collaboration between Bird and Ian Schneller, the sculptor and instrument-maker who created the musician’s horn-like speaker. For Sonic Arboretum, he’s created some 50 more, which are installed in the space to create a unique sound garden.
Bird records compositions on-site, then transmits musical information to different groups of ‘hornets’ and ‘hornlings’ via multiple loops. He can then change the compositions from home via computer so that the music evolves over the course of the event. In two special live concerts on on December 21 and 22, Bird will also perform live in the MCA’s atrium, manipulating the sounds he produces on his violin while the audience members move through the space (You can watch Bird in action at the Guggenheim here).
We won’t pretend to understand the science behind Schneller’s observations on the difference in ‘spatial dispersion’ between the tall and conical Guggenheim and the cube-like MCA, or why this means that this week’s broadcast/performance in the Chicago museum will sound particularly ‘outstanding’. But we readily believe that it will.
And even if it didn’t, the horned speakers, varying from knee-high to nine feet tall in striking shades of red, green, orange and gold, create a striking visual spectacle. Incredibly, they’re made from compressed newspaper, baking soda and dryer lint, which Schneller’s acquaintances have started saving up and sending to him in bag loads. Machine-clogging grey fluff has never sounded so fine.
Best of the rest
- Trapeze artists from Brazil, acrobats from China and performing dogs from Germany – if it defies gravity (or, in the odd circumstance, taste) then it’s at The International Circus Festival in the Netherlands this week, which for the sixteenth year offers a sort of public world summit for circus acts.
- Charlie Chaplin’s daughter Victoria Thierrée Chaplin has created a follow-up to the internationally acclaimed Aurélia’s Oratorio. Premiering at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall this week, Murmurs is the icy crown on the 2011 Southbank Winter Festival, combining theatre, illusion and dance in a wintry urban romance.
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