Mpls St Paul - Ted Hearne Review

The Immersive Experience of Liquid Music's In Your Mouth Ted Hearne’s theatrical composition combined with Dorothea Lasky’s striking poetry created a unique sonic experience.

Kait Ecker November 25, 2019

Courtesy of the Walker Art Center

The wild, imaginative world premiere of In Your Mouth, a Liquid Music installment at the Walker Art Center, engages the audience in a visual, auditory, and emotional performance.

Composer Ted Hearne sets Dorothea Lasky’s poems to music as Rachel Perry creates visual art in this theatrical show. It’s captivatingly collaborative, as the art, words, and music intertwine and envelope the audience into itself.

“I want everybody to be able to take their own feelings from it, and I don’t want to tell anyone what to feel,” Hearne says. “For me, one major thing about the piece is an expression of needing to be wild. Needing to respect the voice inside of myself.”

And as I sat there, that wildness was apparent. The guitarist started the show with an echoing build and hugged the electric guitar with passion. Later, the cellist and violist played with such frenetic fervor, that it captured and held my heart and attention. Hearne himself sang with expressive emotion, changing style fluidly within the set of 12 poetic songs.

“That dichotomy just really, really resonated with me,” Hearne says of Lasky’s poetry, referencing a disconnect between the mind and the heart. “Because at the time I really thought that there were things I was feeling that were at odds with the way that I was living my life, or the choices that I had made in my life, and I felt like I was sort of not whole, in that way. And I wanted my insides to match my outsides.”

The process of setting Lasky’s words to music gave Hearne the opportunity to make progress in matching his insides to his outsides, he says. And, looking back on the performance, there seems to be a sense of relief ringing through parts of it–but whether that’s due to Hearne’s reduced disconnect, the release of wildness, or my own experience is impossible to say.

The entire show was like nothing I’d experienced before. It was like performance art meets a poetry slam, meets edgy music, meets theater. The music spanned all different styles, with a healthy dosage of electronic effects, sporadic rhythms, and innovative drum and percussion use mixed in.

“A few of those songs I wrote two years ago, and a few of them I wrote two weeks ago, you know? And the ones I wrote two weeks ago are really like a comment on the whole process,” Hearne says. “I think the core of this piece was about really writing simple songs. And there’s, of course, a bunch of complexity that made its way in, but I think the core of it was about accessing some songwriters who have been super important to me.”

The music shifted from tender to rebellious to heartbreaking to humorous, accentuating the precise, orchestrated chaos of the piece. There were start-stop cadences that occasionally left the audience in a thick quiet before continuing. Lasky’s words were elevated and played with in each piece, as their meaning cuts through the commotion.

“What are the limitations of your own experience? And what does it mean for me to put these words by this poet with this experience and this gender identity into my mouth?” Hearne says.

“It’s that layer I think that really provides the ability to connect with the words, because you have to feel them very viscerally, but then you have to be able to understand your difference and understand your relationship to the other.”

While music was being made, a screen projected video of Perry snipping her shiny scissors away at food stickers and placing them into wandering lines onto a large canvas was projected onto a screen. The imagery meandered the line between abstract to startlingly sharp, playing off the music’s own irregularity and dissonance.

“I think she’s a really brilliant artist,” Hearne says, commenting on the way she works with mundane found materials. “In the drawing she’s making on stage, she’s cutting up these tiny

little food stickers, and something about that, to me, really spoke to how you can interact with the structured world around you. And make something really, really special in it.”

After the world premiere at the Walker’s McGuire Theater, the show will eventually be performed at Carnegie Hall, which commissioned the piece, says Hearne.

“We’re trying to just make something that casts a kind of spell, and puts Ted’s music, and Dotty’s language, and Rachel’s visual work into conversation with each other,” says director Daniel Fish. “And that’s what my job really is.”

The spell was cast, and then you’re abruptly woken from it as the performance ends on a stark note with the piece “You Are Not Dead,” which ends on the word “dead.”

“I wanted to close with that because I just think that poem is very beautiful, but you know, are you going to act like you’re alive or are you going to act like you’re dead?” asks Hearne.

*** http://mspmag.com/arts-and-culture/the-morning-after/liquid-music-in-your-mouth/