Commissioned for the 2016 Dallas Symphony Orchestra Soluna festival. During a two-week residency at the Nasher Sculpture Centre, Dallas in May 2016, Mai-Thu Perret, together with Tamara Barnett-Herrin, Beatrice Dillon, and Anja Schmidt, created the parameters and musical score that comprise o, as performed by the artist and her collaborators, with students of the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. Taking Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel Les Guérillères as a starting point, o is largely unscripted and disrupts the traditional space between performer and viewer with unexpected sounds, music, and movements. Over the course of two-hours, musicians divided across galleries and throughout the garden play live electronics and percussion. Performers vocalize and read aloud as they create patterns and moments of stillness, using both the monumental and intimate spaces of the museum. The title of the work relates to Perret’s and Barnett-Herrin’s shared interest in speaking and semiotics: “o” can be a sound, a discrete word (“Oh!”), as well as a symbol for a circle or the integer zero. The simple title also refers to primitive languages that begin with sounds and utterances that are subsequently assigned meanings and become the words of a developed language.
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