Thea Little - Honest Process
Gold Bolus Recordings 048
Released digitally & on CD 6/25/2020
"an underwater opera from a lost episode of Star Trek" - Dance-Enthusiast.com
What better way to spend quarantine than by immersing yourself in the bizarre and asemic world of Thea Little's Honest Process. Using a language developed in collaboration with performers, Little's character capsules are attempts to make gestures that en-capsulate different attitudes, ideas, and concepts. In this live album the sounds are abstracted from their movement counterparts, to be appreciated as vocal music in the vein of Sten Hanson or Meredith Monk. Little enlisted the help of long-time Monk associate Peter Sciscioli to refine the performance.
Electronic manipulations from composer and digital artist Brian McCorkle attempt to take the sounds to their conclusion; a landscape, an expression of how individual political expression can create a discourse that can cause change, for better or for worse. Combining minimal electronics and sampling, Honest Process is a gentle exploration and meditation on politics, ambition, and healing.
Performed at a sold-out National Sawdust in 2019, the album is also a study in what the sound of a full room of people watching bodies move is. The electronics are at times frenetic and overpowering, at times just vocal samples crushed into ocean waves, at times completely silent. Developed shortly after the suicide of two close friends of Little and McCorkle, Honest Process is also a movement toward healing and the stages of grief.
Little and McCorkle have been working together since 2013, when Little performed in Any Size Mirror is a Dictator, a collaboration between Panoply Performance Laboratory (of which McCorkle is co-Director and composer-in-residence) and drearysomebody. There are moments of the experimental opera or New Music aesthetic here, like Little's "song" sung by performers and echoed as a lietmotif throughout the piece.
Almost all of the electronics heard on the album are manipulations of vocalizations which are part of a performance system developed by Little called Character Capsules.
Music for meditation, music for thinking, music for healing.
Thea Little is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist whose work draws upon performance art, dance, and experimental opera. She has composed more than 50 scores presented in the U.S. and abroad. Little attended the School of American Ballet and holds MFA and BA degrees in Dance respectively from Hollins University and Columbia University. Thea has performed in the U.S. and Europe with New York City Ballet, The Whitney Museum, The Traveling Trolley in Kingston, NY and WUK in Vienna. She has worked with Neta Pulvermacher, Todd Williams, Moving Theater, Panoply Performance Laboratory, Anaïs Maviel, Feminist Art Group (FAG), and Shen Wei Dance Arts. Prior to Thea’s sold-out performance at National Sawdust during her year-long residency there, her work has been presented at Earthdance, Dåncēhølø, RECESS by the Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation, Asia Society, Women Between Arts at The New School, Center for Performance Research, the NYU Music Department, The Exponential Festival, The Beaux Arts Court in The Brooklyn Museum, and The Performance Mix31 Festival. She is currently a returning LEIMAY Fellow and her next full-length work will be presented at The Hudson Eye and OUTSIGHT. Thea is proud to be on the Advisory Board of New Dance Alliance.
Brian McCorkle is a composer, performer, and digital artist. He is also co-Director of the Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL) and a founding member of Varispeed Collective. About McCorkle's music the Village Voice says "my melting ears are still recovering" and his collaborations with Varispeed have been praised by the New York Times for their ability "to unleash latent potential" and were called "impressive" - Posture Magazine calls his voice "chillingly resonant." He performs regularly as a multi-instrumentalist and vocalist, flouting genre while drawing from decades of experience as a professional musician in a wide array of contexts while also making electronic instruments combined with sculpture. McCorkle's work with PPL has been described by the Guardian as "working to distill a bevy of sophisticated ideas into word and action."