Interdisciplinary Practice as a Foundation for Experimental Music Theatre

This commentary is a discussion about and around several creative works, by the author, written between 2016-2018. After an initial explanation of how the author’s work fits within an expanded field of experimental music theatre, the author looks at each work in broader interdisciplinary contexts, unified by four main themes: production, the audiovisual contract, aesthetic ‘poorness’, and the divide between live and mediatised performance. Discourse around the works in the portfolio is consistently framed by a number of contextual case studies from parallel disciplines of sound art, traditional and contemporary theatre, fine art, and film in order to bring uncommon perspectives to a music-orientated work, and present potentially innovative models for experimental music theatre making. In particular, the commentary dedicates one chapter each to the work of two artists/companies who remain relatively unstudied in compositional contexts: Richard Foreman, and Miss Revolutionary Idol Berserker. Overall this commentary articulates a fluid relationship between practice and theory that outlines potentially innovative and unusual models of interdisciplinary production relevant and new to the author’s own work, and to the field of experimental music theatre more generally.