Vrengt: A Shared Body–Machine Instrument for Music–Dance Performance

Abstract

What if a musician could step outside the familiar instrumental paradigm and adopt a new embodied language for moving through sound with a dancer in true partnership? And what if a dancer’s body could coalesce with a musician’s skills and intuitively render movements into instrumental actions for active sound-making? 'Vrengt' is a multi-user instrument, specifically developed for music-dance performance, with a particular focus on exploring the boundaries between standstill vs motion, and silence vs sound. We sought for creating a work for one, hybrid corporeality, in which a dancer and a musician would co-creatively and co-dependently interact with their bodies and a machine. The challenge, then, was how could two performers with distinct embodied skills unite in a continuous entanglement of intentions, senses and experiences to control the same sonic and musical parameters? This was conceptually different than they had done before in the context of interactive dance performances.