VENT. Dummy. On Photography. Stay On It. Musarc Winter Konsert 2024. 14 Dec, 4–6pm

Musarc’s annual Winter Konsert goes in search of the voice and its double, the voice that speaks, ventriloquises and hallucinates; the voice that issues from the sun; the irreverent, syncopated, trippy and relentless voice; the voice of protest, deconstruction and rebuilding, dissonant and hopeful; the voice that stays on it, and the voice that keeps saying it, together, beatless and anarchic.

The programme, for which Musarc is returning to The Wash Houses at London Metropolitan University, opens with a screening of Imogen Stidworthy’s Dummy (1998), a monologue travestied as a dialogue, stripping bare the secret machinations of the ventriloquist act. Ventriloquism, anarchy, and the aftermath of protest animate the world première of VENT, a new work by composer Benjamin Oliver and puppeteer Rachel Warr for staged objects, electronics and choir. The voice-apparatus arrests its own image in Gavin Bryars’s poetic and flowing On Photography (1983) before the evening culminates in the phase-shifting, irreverent riffs and patterns of Julius Eastman’s Stay On It (1973).

Musarc will be performing a text score by Jennifer Walshe and in Russel Haswell’s the truth is as elusive as ever (2024, world premiere) at the opening night of London Contemporary Music Festival on Wednesday 11 December at Hackney Church (sorry). Our Winter Konsert on Saturday 14 December has been timed to allow audiences who want to head over to LCMF’s final night and arrive on time at 7pm (music starts at 7.30). Actually not sorry.