amanda stewart

poet, writer and performer who lives in sydney. since the late seventies she has created and presented a variety of poetic works, performances, radio and multimedia works in australia, japan, u.s.a. and europe. in 1989, together with jim denley, chris mann, rik rue and stevie wishart, she cofounded machine for making sense, with whom she continues to collaborate. also, in 1995, she founded the trio allos with anne la berge and jim meneses. besides, stewart has worked with musicians, dancers and other artists and is the author of the opera ìthe sinking of the rainbow warriorî along with the composer colin bright.
stewart works mainly as a soloist and has performed in a diversity of poetry, new music and intermedia festivals including the sydney biennale, ars electronica (linz, austria), poetry international (rotterdam, netherlands), the geneva festival (switzerland), polysonnerie (lyon, france), donaueschingen musiktage (germany) and ten years of soho festival (new york). her book and cd set of selected poems written between 1980 and 1996 was a finalist in the national digital media awards and won the anne elder poetry prize at the national literary awards, australia, in 1999. since 1995 she has divided her time between sydney and europe. in 2003 she was elected a fellow of stiftung kulturfonds, germany, and she is currently working on several new cojoint projects and on her next collection of poetry. on stage, she is one of the most powerful and accomplished australian poets and this will be her first appearance in barcelona.
 

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The voice is that unique instrument with the ability to synthesise semantic, musical,
analytical and emotional structures. If we look below the surface of speech we find
beginnings, residues, disjunctions- the flux of complex oral and propositional codes
that recombine at the edge of distinction (culture).

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Recently, I’ve been interested in exploring disjunctions between different oral, written
and electronic ‘forms of inscription’ or modes of memory in solo works and in
collaborations as a poet, performer and improviser. For some time I explored how
musico-poetic systems work within discourse. I researched particular discourses to
try and see how they were interarticulated by various individuals and institutions
using specific syntax, vocabulary and mythic structures, as well as certain non-
verbal and musical architectures with different intonational, rhythmic, timbral, dynamic
and pitch systems. I wanted to hear what sort of subject a specific mode of address
assumed, the paradigms it was capable of invoking and how it set up its connections.
I became interested in the complexity of oral grammars which function, at different
levels simultaneously, within speech and in our use of the voice. In particular I was
interested in the mesh of systems at work within Australian speech.

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In some of my poems, like postiche, semantic sequences are tightly scored on tape and
in print. In this case, a poem consists of two entities, a written score which is open to
lateral interpretation and an aural score which remains fixed and immutable. In other pieces,
I use a number of parallel scores so that it is not possible to perform ‘the whole work’.
‘The work’ is the work of a process of engagement with overlapping fields of notation.

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These recent electroacoustic pieces compose with relationships and distinctions
between language, music, logic, speech, incorporating ideas from linguistics,
psychoanalysis, science and philosophy. These modes are juxtaposed with
specific compositional and extended vocal techniques. The vocalist must generate her/his
performance from a multi-paradigmatic reference field of notations and implied
utterances. Many of these potential utterances remain unarticulated, so that the pieces
are as much about what is not uttered as what is. For example, several of these works
deal with subject-verb-object relations where the performer (x) is caught between two
sets of scores (i/it). One pair of scores (i) is recorded (split left and right) on tape.
The other pair (it) is written (split left and right) on paper. The vocalist (x) listens to the
two aural scores while simultaneously negotiating the two written scores and must
generate her/his performance from this interaction. In Ô mt Õ, for voice, mini disc and
modular texts, miniature poems recorded onto mini-disc are played on random shuffle
to form a new poem which the performer must negotiate in her performance. Fields
of reference collide, converse, contradict and modulate each other as well as coexist
without reference to each other.

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Played by discourse, the voice contains the antecedents and technologies of cultural
assumptions; how sound is sorted into structure, the grammar of distinctions. The voice
offers one of the most complex listening fields as it has the ability to laterally slide between
a range of systems. It is possible to construct a multi-referential field of signifiers. To reveal
the listening subject beyond the edge of it/self. A subject in flux. A subject caught in
a multi-causal simultaneity of the uttered and the unsounded.

butratherthatoneispeakingofsomethingelse.........................................................................