FLOODESIGN

It brings to mind Dziga Vertov's "Man With a Movie Camera" (1929), which associates the process of filming, editing and projecting with the work of factory laborers, women having their hair done, men receiving a shave and the bureaucratic procedure of getting married or divorced — ordinary tasks that nonetheless change the social conditions of the body. In the film, we see Vertov's wife, the master filmmaker and film editor Yelizaveta Svilova, splicing and taping these small excerpts of daily life into a frenzied composition that ultimately transforms into a hypnotic expression of imaginative labor. Contrasting the contrived drama of narrative music and the austerity of minimalist music, Wolfe and Beiser similarly aim to show us the physicality of their work, and by imposing rhythm and language onto that work, transcend it. Beiser and Wolfe were still composing when I spoke with them; they discussed the creation of "Spinning" as a back-and-forth collaboration between Wolfe's post-minimalist compositional style and Beiser's performative virtuosity, which often combines the cello with recorded tracks and singing. Wolfe seeks out what she calls extramusical but non-narrative themes to create her compositions, at times using the open tuning present in folk music to put "grit" (Beiser's word) back into the repetitive incantations of minimalist music. Meanwhile, Beiser's fingers manipulating the strings of a cello trace back to traditional methods of spinning thread. The two imagine a rhizomatic piece rooted in images of spiders spinning webs (the strongest thread known in nature) and woven with the sounds of spindle and distaff, the knocking of a spinning wheel, gears grinding in an industrial machine, and references to contemporary popular music. The artist Laurie Olinder will project found, drawn and re-animated representations of spinning, broadly interpreted, onto layers of scrim wrapped around the cellists onstage, creating a durational visual environment that entwines with the music. Wolfe speaks of her scores as incorporating some element of open notation, revealing the live communication happening between performers, composer, audience and Olinder as visual artist. We often speak of the derogatory effects of "spin" when detected in propaganda, public relations or gossip: it is interpretative, a biased attempt to persuade. But spinning is how we relate to the ambiguities of our cultural mores and creatively reframe the social conditions of our lived experience. Especially concerning domestic work or blue-collar labor — labor that directly implicates the body — the communicative act of spinning often undermines an authoritative norm. Examples of "spin" are a whisper campaign, a coded gesture and the rhythms of a folk song that, interpreted within specific contexts, can both make work more tolerable and demonstrate a united front within and against the boss's domain. Similarly, the aural and visual landscape created by Wolfe, Beiser and Olinder is a collaborative space, with each participant exchanging different viewpoints on the work at hand. What they suggest is performance as labor, and labor as work of the imagination. Wolfe and Beiser imagine a rhizomatic piece rooted in images of spiders spinning webs (the strongest thread known in nature) and woven with the sounds of spindle and distaff, the knocking of a spinning wheel, gears grinding in an industrial machine, and references to contemporary popular music. www.peakperfs.org 65 Photo: ioulex

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