18.2.11

Thoughts for new trio

I've been thinking about sound textures lately, and how certain soundscapes shape the air, create associations and sensations, and alter our awareness. While watching tv recently, I stepped out of the room during commercials and one came on that takes place partly in an airplane cabin. Whenever it switched to the space of the airplane, the aural atmosphere (the soft hum of the plane, the chatter of people, the clicking closed of overhead compartments, the polite mutter of an attendant making announcements over the speaker system, the muffled beep of the seatbelt sign) would zoom me right into the sensation of contained, forced relaxation and the dead air I associate with flights, and at the same time, the anticipation of the vast, ungrounded feeling of lift off and looking down at the ground far below. I got to thinking about the associations we have to certain textures, which could be textures themselves: the sounds of the plane cabin brings to mind the physical texture of an airplane seat, the sound of the ocean brings to mind the feel of salty water and sand drying on skin, or waves, or whatever. Sounds I am used to hearing in small spaces (coffee brewing in my kitchen, a radio) might give me a more shrunken, private spatial awareness, while the sound of the ocean or cars on a freeway might give me a more expansive awareness of the space I am in, the thinks I am looking at or sensing. Can this be done in a dance, both with literal sound textures and the textures of the bodies in motion? Can that zooming in of a small-space-sound "make bodies matter" by drawing attention to the intimate details? Vice-versa?

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