NEIL LUCK AND ADAM DE LA COUR
Ursonate
20 May 2015
The NiNES Peckham
Neil Luck and Adam de la Cour presented a new interpretation of Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate, taking the seminal sound poetry work as the starting point for a performance for two voices.
Schwitters composed and performed iterations of Ursonate over a period of ten years, from 1922 to 1932. The work employs an invented nonsense language to elicit a wide range of abstract sounds from a solo vocalist. Its title translates directly as “Original Sonata”, suggesting its musical basis.
Luck and de la Cour took this as a starting point to arrange, or possibly orchestrate, the work for two performers. The realisation of the piece was split physiologically between player A’s larynx and player B’s vocal tract articulators.
The artists described the resulting performance as an “anti urtext Ursonate”, an intentionally erred interpretation of a major work in Schwitters’ oeuvre.
ABOUT NEIL LUCK
Neil Luck is a composer, performer and director based in London. His practice spans experimental music, performance and music theatre, with a particular interest in the physical and theatrical nature of live performance.
He is the founder and director of ARCO, an experimental music theatre ensemble exploring alternative approaches to live performance, and co founder of squib box with Adam de la Cour and Federico Reuben, an artist led organisation dedicated to radical and avant garde music.
ABOUT ADAM DE LA COUR
Adam de la Cour is a composer, performer and filmmaker whose work moves between experimental music, contemporary composition, improvisation, film and performance.
His work frequently combines music with humour, absurdity and elements drawn from cinema and popular culture. He is a co founder of squib box and has a longstanding collaborative relationship with Neil Luck across music and performance projects.
THEIR COLLABORATION
Luck and de la Cour had already been developing their unusual interpretation of Ursonate for several years by the time it was presented at The Performance Studio.
The version originated in 2012 when de la Cour was invited to perform parts of Schwitters’ work at the IKON Gallery in Birmingham and invited Luck to develop a duet interpretation with him. Their version physically separates the mechanisms of speech between the two performers, with Luck generating the raw vocal sound and de la Cour articulating it into Schwitters’ text.
EVENT DETAILS
20 May 2015
The Nines
Copeland Estate
133 Copeland Road
Peckham, SE15 3SN
PHOTOGRAPHY
Photo credit: Dimitri Djuric