Lawrence Harvey: Waiting: Pacing

Abstract

The complete version of waiting contains three movements, of which Pacing is the second. The work was commissioned by Danceworks for choreographer Sandra Parker's piece waiting, presented in the company's 1998 season. The work is broadly based around the entry for 'waiting' from A Lover's discourse by Roland Barthes. Central to the selection, transformation and composition of sounds forthis work was that, at one level, choreography is a distribution of energy in space, and music is a distribution of energy in time. This particular movement of waiting traces a constant envelope: a long slow increase in tension and brief dissipation. Across this the five dancers build a contrapuntal mosaic of small rocking motions and explosive spinning gestures. The movement opens with scraps of sound, quickly invaded by more dynamic sonic objects, which wed themselves together in various ways to evoke a sense of inevitable motion. The original sound materials for waiting include the UPIC system, underwater recordings and a suite of studio tools for the spatial distribution of samples created by the composer in MAX. These sounds are heard in their original versions and after various sonic transformations created in SoundHack and HyperPrism.