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3 Works for 12
Pulsers (1976) – David Tudor
“I set out to compose an evening programme made up of three musical works choreographed for a large group of dancers. The musical choices were drawn from the period 1975-1976. The American minimalist wave was already being challenged by young composers who used its architecture but confronted it with other ways of thinking and energies. All three musical pieces persistently question the relationship to rhythm through the use of pulsing beats: they are staccato in Andriessen’s work, constantly unstable in Tudor’s and delicately compelling in Brian Eno’s.
Condensing questions of choreographic composition that I have been working on for twenty years now, 3 Works for 12 is a comprehensive piece, a concentrated exercise in writing, and a treatise on compositional, spatial and dynamic effects.
The group of twelve performers is considered as a mass of soloists, each a medium for a score that gives a visible interpretation of the music.
Rhythms, textures, qualities, flow: the performers are vectors of musical parameters. With elementary power, simplicity of means, high-voltage energy and an obsessive relationship to pulsing beats, 3 Works for 12 develops a range of relationships between dance and music open to multiple possibilities: association, partnership, colonisation, authority, and so on.
Louis Andriessen’s description of his piece Hoketus served as a mantra for these three choreographic proposals: to create “gigantic dancing human machines”.
Alban Richard, July 2019
