Shifting Reflections by Alice Blumenfeld and Aurie Hsu

Music: flutter by Aurie Hsu

Duration: 13'

Program Notes

Shifting Reflections is a collaboration between Alice Blumenfeld and Aurie Hsu. Combining practices in Flamenco, contemporary belly dance, and butoh, we explored themes of memory, visual and sonic echoes, presence, distance, and ideas of embodied, imagined, and yet to be experienced nostalgia. Created in tandem with the choreography, the music, flutter (2020), evokes these states relying on transformations of sounds recorded from the movement. The sounds include the falling flamenco skirt transformed into a wash of patterned white noise, delay lines on the fan flutter, the iconic Flamenco shoe stomp reverbed out, and layers of mingling timbral and harmonic textures that echo one another. In performance, the sounds from stage and fixed media interweave to metaphorically reflect how experiences of memory and nostalgia shift and sway. Shifting Reflections is part of Blumenfeld’s evening length work, Beyond Nostalgia.

Lighting Design by Ben Saltz

Performances

International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), Santiago, Chile, 7/25-7/31/2021 (virtual)

RAD Fest, Kalamazoo, MI, 3/5-3/7/2021 (virtual)

Cleveland Public Theater Danceworks, 4/16-18/2020 (Cancelled due to COVID-19 Closure)

Wurtzel Theater, TIMARA 50th Anniversary: Sound in the Round Faculty Concert, Oberlin, OH, 3/8/2020