Proposal for CAGE101 conference (Malaysia)

unCage your mind

By Teresa Vila Verde

At CAGE101’s conference I want to get inside John Cage’s mind to uncage our minds about what art is. Indeed, the knowledge of Cage’s work and philosophy is crucial to understand of what art means today. And I am not just referring to music, but to a large arena of activities that are usually called by the umbrella name of performance. 

Cage’s interest in improvisation and free association challenged many art conventions in the fifties and paved the way for the happenings and other performance activities that happened during the sixties and seventies. But we can find echoes of his experiments in today’s art discourse and practice. Therefore, my presentation will be guided and fuelled by the questions: where can we find Cage today? How did Cage’s experiments contribute to a paradigm change in the art world? How can Cage uncage our mind about art? To answer these questions I will put my attention in some pivotal contemporary artists, like for example the body artist Marina Abramovic, whose work express, in my opinion, why John Cage’s mind is so important to us understand contemporary acts. 

This undertaking seems to me urgent to do because, even 101 years after his birth, his work is still controversial, especially among musicians and music students, which tend to ignore it or to ironize it. Acknowledging this I will endeavour to demonstrate why there is an art world before Cage and an art world after Cage. To do this I will make a lecture-performance that will interlink Cage’s work with silence, words, video, performance and, hopefully, spirituality. 

Teresa VV

The Piano and the Female Body (part one)

Video presented at the Two Thousand + TWELVE Symposium
Queen's University of Belfast (North Ireland), March 2012

Publicação do novo artigo!!

Publicação do artigo apresentado na Academia Sibelius (Helsínquia) em Setembro 2010

Music as Performance: a place of fight and flight

Acessível em http://www.siba.fi/web/embodimentofauthority/proceedings/vila-verde

Tvv

The Sound of my Body

Proposal for the Two Thousand + TWELVE Symposium

Belfast, 22-27th March 2012

http://www.sonorities.org.uk/

The sound of my body 

The field of Performance gives close attention to aspects of performance that are usually neglected by musicians. When we think about music as performance, new relations between the body and music, body and mind, body and space, body and technologies, the performer’s body and the audience’s body, are brought out to light. Performance thus paves the way for exciting new insights about music-thinking and music-making.

As a music practitioner with keen interest in the Performance field, at the Two Thousand + TWELVE Symposium I will present my work exploring the new relations that arise from thinking of music and performance together. First I will contextualize the body, and the artist’s body in particular, through a varied range of studies taken from philosophy to musicology and performance, aiming to understand the paradigm shift that happened around the position of the artist’s body inside the Western culture. This will be followed by a video screening of my solo improvisation project, done during my Masters in Contemporary Music at Brunel University (West London/2008), which explores the connections between my body and the piano’s body. Inspired in Pina Bausch’s aesthetical universe, I created a kind of choreography of movements that generated sound on the piano – a sound that became the music of my body.

TERESA VILA VERDE

Biography

Teresa Vila Verde is a Portuguese music performer, researcher and teacher with keen interest in the world of Performance. Her work explores the visual, technological, corporeal and site-specific dimension of Music and has been presented in a variety of academic and artistic contexts. For further information see www.teresavilaverde.com