Home / Arts & Life / Review: Resonant Bodies Festival, a Summer Camp for Singers

Review: Resonant Bodies Festival, a Summer Camp for Singers

The most telling paean to the Resonant Bodies Festival at its opening night on Tuesday came from the vocalist and composer Theo Bleckmann, who took the stage first. Thanking the audience for coming, he said that the festival, this year at Roulette in Brooklyn, had organized the most impressive backstage he had encountered in 30 years of performing.

There were yoga balls, he reported. There were massages. There were lozenges and tinctures. There was coconut water and pineapple for vocal health. (Pineapple! Who knew?)

The impression he gave of Resonant Bodies, which runs through Thursday, was of a kind of scrappily luxurious summer camp for singers. Which is probably just what Lucy Dhegrae, the event’s founder and organizer, intended. An immersion in experimental vocal music, this is as artist-focused as a festival gets; it was started, Ms. Dhegrae told me in a recent interview, primarily to give performers the opportunity to get to know one another’s work.

That work is often a work in progress. Much of the appeal of Resonant Bodies has been the possibility of hearing pieces in the process of formation. And in juxtaposition: The festival has stuck, since its premiere in 2013, to a defining structure of three nights, each with three performers free to program a 45-minute set however they like.

Photo

Jennifer Walshe’s “The Church of Frequency & Protein” called for percussionists to zest oranges and tear mint leaves.

Credit
Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York Times

A Resonant Bodies evening is a triptych of snapshots. Tuesday brought Mr. Bleckmann’s woozy, spacey lounge act, his airy voice distorted by electronic echo effects and little idiosyncrasies. (At one point, he sounded like a ukulele strumming.) The words in his “Songs in Color and Black and White” are few and difficult to discern: The emphasis is on trippy washes, vocal Color Field paintings, and the overall effect is of looking at cabaret standards through squinted eyes.

Perhaps something sober and sensible was what you felt you needed after Mr. Bleckmann’s dazed set? Well, the Irish composer and vocalist Jennifer Walshe’s “The Church of Frequency & Protein” — an explosive, sometimes funny mess of a reflection on media, memes and “Donkey Kong” — was not it.

Continue reading the main story

About admin

Check Also

Hear the Best Albums and Songs of 2023

Dear listeners, In the spirit of holiday excess and end-of-the-year summation, we’re about to make …