This fall, the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery was delighted to welcome the UBC Contemporary Players as they responded to Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts. Directed by UBC School of Music faculty Dr. Paolo Bortolussi, the UBC Contemporary Players ensemble includes graduate and undergraduate students focusing on music and performance of our time. Programs blend masterworks by internationally acclaimed composers with exciting world premieres of works written expressly for the ensemble by UBC composition majors.
In lieu of a public concert at the Belkin as has occurred in recent years, the Contemporary Players privately performed a work written by a Canadian composer in response to the works of Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts, which asks how a score can be a call and a tool for decolonization. The exhibition's corresponding investigations take at their centre questions of embodiment and relationality, of calls and responses. What are the practical matters of embodied decolonization, and how can we practice them? How does embodiment facilitate unlearning, unknowing, and the visioning of Indigenous ontologies?
The students were invited to perform their chosen works in the gallery space as agents in this extended conversation. With a conceptual focus on authorship and collaboration, the Contemporary Players teased out the nuances of relationality and presence by relying on improvisational skills to execute a precious performance: a site-specific, one time only meditation on all that the exhibition encompasses.
To view video footage of the Contemporary Players' performances, please visit the Belkin Art Gallery webpage here. Videos of these performances are shared on the Belkin Art Gallery website for reference, research, and enjoyment in perpetuity.