There Might Be Others
This document is a collection of propositions. It contains the dance and music score, performer instructions, guiding principles, and notes on the collaborations that led to the creation of the performance of There Might Be Others. In publishing this document the work becomes an open source for any reiterations, reimaginings, and repurposings. It is a field guide to a process of collective composition, an archive of a project, and presents the score as a set of possibilities to be taken in parts or absorbed as a whole. While a held paper is a fixed item, the score is a moment on a continuum. TMBO marks choreographer Rebecca Lazier’s New York Live Arts debut with this commissioned movement-based realization of Terry Riley’s seminal masterpiece IN C, performed with a live score by Dan Trueman in collaboration with members of two of today’s most vital ensembles, Sō Percussion and Mobius Percussion. Created along with a diverse group of artists, designers and scientists, and featuring an international cadre of performers, the work questions the role of presence, performer agency and collective decision-making to create emergent forms.
“Seminal works of the avant-garde become so when the inherent risk at the heart of the experiment catalyzing the vision to its fruition pushes the work’s sphere of influence beyond its original form and often its intended meaning. Intrepid choreographer Rebecca Lazier’s penchant for musical interpretation and the infinite aesthetic and physical languages in its breadth makes her among the very best of her generation and as this book attests, she possesses a vision that will bear influence on generations to come. What a gift to this and future generations that the unique scope of this remarkable project will have its record in the pages of this tract, and a gift to us to be a part of bringing There Might Be Others to life.” — Tommy Kriegsmann, Director of Programs, New York Live Arts
About the Contributor(s)
Rebecca Lazier is a New York-based choreographer originally from Nova Scotia. She has collaborated with new music composers and ensembles including Shane Shanahan, Jody Elff, Fred Ho, Dan Trueman, Paul Lansky, Newspeak, and now, Mobius and Sō Percussion. Lazier's most recent work, Coming Together/Attica, premiered at The Invisible Dog Art Center and was named one of 2013's most memorable experiences by critic Eva Yaa Asantewaa and subsequently toured throughout the U.S., Canada, Turkey, and Greece. A film adaptation was exhibited at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. In New York Lazier's work has been presented at Danspace Project, The Kitchen, Symphony Space, 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center, and Movement Research at Judson Church.
She has toured nationally to The Yard (Martha's Vineyard), Highways Performance Space (Los Angeles), Jacob's Pillow, Tulane University, Mobius (Boston), Columbia College (Chicago), Sushi Performance and Visual Art (San Diego), International Festival of Ideas (New Haven), among many. Internationally her work has been presented at venues in Canada, Greece, Russia, Poland, and across Turkey. Lazier has received a Bessie Schönberg Choreography Residency at The Yard and was an honorary fellow at Djerassi. In New York she has been the artist-in-residence at the Joyce Theater Foundation, funded with major support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Movement Research, funded, in part, by the Leonard and Sophie Davis Fund. Lazier is currently on faculty at Princeton University.
Dan Trueman is a musician: a fiddler, a collaborator, a teacher, a developer of new instruments, a composer of music for ensembles of all shapes and sizes. He has worked with ensembles such as Sō Percussion, the PRISM Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Gallicantus, the JACK Quartet, as well as individuals like scientist Naomi Leonard, choreographer Rebecca Lazier, poet Paul Muldoon, director Mark DeChiazza, fiddler Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, vocalist Iarla Ó Lionáird, guitarist/songwriter Monica Mugan, and many others. Dan's work has been recognized by fellowships, grants, commissions, and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, the Bessies, the Fulbright Commission, the American Composers Forum, the American Council of Learned Societies, Meet the Composer, among others. He is Professor of Music and Director of the Princeton Sound Kitchen at Princeton University.
Current and recent projects include bitKlavier (the prepared digital piano); The Fate of Bones, a new record with Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh (to be released in April '20); 24 Preludes for bitKlavier (in progress); Songs That Are Hard To Sing, for Sō Percussion and the JACK Quartet (released by New Amsterdam Records in 2019); Midden Find, for fiddler Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and Contemporaneous (in progress); Olagón, an opera featuring Iarla Ó Lionáird, with text by Paul Muldoon, and directed by Mark DeChiazza (premiering at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, May '21, with the Crash Ensemble); There Might Be Others, with choreographer Rebecca Lazier and scientist Naomi Leonard (winner of a Bessie Award, Outstanding Music Composition).
Elæ Moss is a multimodal artist-researcher, curator, designer, and educator. Seeking Speculative Solidarities, they employ analog and digital media to investigate human, institutional and ecological systems and to iterate open source strategies for ecological and social change. Recent projects have shown at La Mama Galleria, EFA Project Space, STWST/Ars Electronica, Usdan Gallery, Judson Church, the Segal Center, SOHO20, Dixon Place, and the Exponential Festival, among others. Select publications include Big Echo, Tagvverk, Vestiges, Matters of Feminist Practice, The Transgender Narratives Anthology, Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, The Brooklyn Poets Anthology, and Resist Much, Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance. Books include Ground, Blood Altas, Overview Effect, Sweet and Low: Indefinite Singular, Bodies of Work, and The Precarity Bodyhacking Work-Book and Guide. Moss is a Professor at Pratt Institute, and the developer / founder of the Operating System + Liminal Lab. More at: https://onlywhatican.net and https://theoperatingsystem.org.
