Artists : Ly Tran & Connor McLean
[ performance ]
Time : 25.04 • 16:00 - 16:35 (35 min)
Location : Radar
The soprano Ly Tran navigates the stage exploring loneliness, fear, longing, and how to be in the world. McLean’s music sees Ly in a variety of roles and the stage itself as a shifting landscape.
Info about the piece
Desire Paths focuses on figuring out how to be in the world. In this piece, Ly Tran moves across the stage in search of meaning, identity, and beauty. She might not arrive at full answers, but only at a trace of their outlines. The work explores loneliness, fear, anxiety, and longing, and how these feelings are expressed through the objects we attach ourselves to as well as the subtle performances we enact in everyday life. Desire Paths deploys many different media formats, which all interact with Ly, with each another, and with the stage itself. McLean makes use of both Ly’s entire person and the stage as a unified body.
Through experimentation with transducers, microphones, small speakers, wearable electronic instruments, and performance garments, McLean develops a performance system in which sound emerges through motion, contact, and narrative. The performer becomes a vessel for both sonic material and dramaturgical tension, and she is transformed into both the instrument and the stage. The performance bring attention to the friction between people and the objects around them, and between desire and disconnection. Ly’s walk, her touch, the light, the floor, the microphones, the screen, and her voice all become compositional elements. As the work’s subject, Ly is hyper-exposed, offering herself to the gaze of both audience and composer under the magnifying glass of the stage. She portrays the impossibility of “finding yourself” in the sea of signifiers we are presented with as tools to do so. Commissioned by Ly Tran in 2024, the piece draws on recordings, videos, and interviews created during an extended workshop process. The project is supported by KodaKultur and Statens Kunstfond, and the performance at SPOR is a world premiere.
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Ly Tran (1983) is a Danish singer and performer based in Copenhagen. She graduated from the Danish National Academy of Music and further studied with Eleanor Forbes in Berlin and with Anne Rosing. She has specialized in contemporary music, exploring themes rooted in her own experiences as well as in current societal conditions, for example by addressing personal and collective traumas, and she generally seeks to create connections between people by embracing vulnerability in her projects. Her approach is characterized by openness and curiosity, and in her collaborations with composers, she continually seeks new modes of expression. The projects range from small solo pieces and chamber works to full-evening performances incorporating elements such as video, pre-recorded sound, improvisational sequences, and call-and-response community singing with the audience. Recent projects include Myriader af tabte minder, which explores Ly Tran’s repressed early childhood in Vietnam and her time as a boat refugee, written for soprano and string quartet by Aya Yoshida and performed at, among other venues, the Gaudeamus Festival, and RITUAL – The Lost Voice Plot by Kirstine Lindemann, which examines the human encounter with the machine and the possibility of rethinking and transforming ourselves, which premiered at Klang Festival. In addition, Ly Tran has previously collaborated with, among others, Louis d’Heudières, Jeppe Ernst, Jexper Holmen, Marcela Lucatelli, Mette Nielsen, Martin Stauning, and James Black. In 2022, she received the Fair Practice Award from the Danish Composers’ Society for her work with new music.
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Connor McLean (1996) is a composer and performer from Chicago, living and working in Copenhagen. His work focuses on music theater, combining found sounds, video, and images with instrumental writing informed by his background in both experimental classical and rock music. He investigates how performance on stage might re-enchant a disenchanted world, using miracles, magic, illusion, bodies, surprise, humor, and sincerity as tools. In both his own works and those of his colleagues, he frequently appears as narrator, vocalist, guitarist, or director. In recent years, his active presence on stage has become integral to his artistic conception of himself, functioning not only as performance but as a means of establishing a proximity between authorship and the work itself. He is a founding member of Munich Operating Theater, with his long-term artistic partner Nikolaus von Bemberg, as well as The Ensemble That Loves You with his friend, the composer James Black. He studied at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and the Royal Danish Academy of Music. His work has been presented at festivals including Klang, SPOR, Nordic Music Days, Minu, Darmstadt, and Aalborg Opera Festival, and it has been performed by leading European ensembles and soloists including K!art, Neko 3, NJYD, DR Vokal Ensemblet, Marco Blauw, The Arctic Philharmonic Sinfonietta, Kollektiv Unruhe, Trio Sol, and others.