The Chairs of Tàpies: Difraccions Series

The Chairs of Tàpies is a series of multidisciplinary sound actions organised in the context of the Tàpies Centenary Year, with the collaboration of Pompeu Fabra University. The proposal focuses on the voice and words to create a sound accompaniment to oral memory. In this way, each of the thirteen sessions will feature a creator whose starting point will be the chair, taken as a performative object, linking back to the creative universe of Tàpies through the expressive languages and settings of the present day.

The Tàpies chairs: cicle Difraccions

The tenth sound action of the cycle is “L’escolta fugaç”, a proposal from the cicle Difraccions. Listening, as the central act of the musical event, emerges in its highest intensity in the context of multidisciplinary improvisation, both on the part of the public and those performing. The creation of material through improvisation shifts us into a state of ongoing attention, where we are required to react to the appearance of new ideas that might arise from chance, fortuitous mishaps, deviations or even new imaginary worlds of sound.

The guitarist Amidea Clotet proposes a dialogue between sound and movement with the dancer Sònia Sánchez. This interchange invites us to reflect on the role of listening in generative improvisation. How do performers listen to themselves while improvising, and how do they respond to their deviations, errors or new solutions as they arise when performing live? How does movement react to sound, and how is sound modified in function of what movement proposes? Listening, at the core of the musical event, is made manifest in this context with full intensity.

Amidea Clotet is one of the emerging figures in the Barcelona generative improvisation scene. She studied electric guitar at the Liceu Conservatory in Barcelona, as well as contemporary composition in Denmark, which is where she began her path towards improvised music. Clotet creates spontaneous soundscapes using extended techniques and objects, resulting in music that is raw and, as she observes, arises as a response to the times we live in. Her creations are situated part-way between playfully risky sound experimentation and the beauty of subtlety.

Sònia Sánchez is a dancer whose work has its foundations in flamenco, free improvisation and the Japanese Body Weather dance technique. She has a preference for improvised sound laboratories exploring through the body, while her work is grounded in flamenco roots of sound in space, the body that resonates in movement and danced space. She began her research into the relationship between the attitude of flamenco rhythm and the organic speed of Body Weather in 2001. In 2004, she added to her career path an interest in free music, and since then has dedicated herself to daily exploration of this broad array of terrains and horizons