Good Girls Gone Bad

T

This image perfectly sums up why I love Cher, why she is "goals", but also why I don't understand her relationship with Sonny Bono at all. Ann and I were really interested in the power dynamics in their relationship, Cher is a young, beautiful, Native woman who meets Sonny when she's 17 and Sonny is this really creepy (at least to us) seeming 27 year old who has no talent but a lot of connections. To us it seemed very clear that He was taking advantage of her and that she should have been the star.
In our sound piece we wanted to use the song "I Got You Babe" and take it out of it's very pop sound and reimagine it in the avant-garde tradition of John Cage and LaMonte Young. For the sound of our piece I was thinking a lot about the Cocteau Twins - how their music moves beyond language at many points. I wanted this piece to do some of that work, to feel like a trance, to resist comprehension and instead to elicit an emotional and physical response.

John Cage and La Monte Young came in with how we chose to exhibit the piece. We wanted to disrupt the ways you normally listen to music, which can be this very isolated act, and force a connection. This started by taking everyone to the stairwell of the wellness center,everyone was on a different level visually and aurally which made the group listening experience strange and disorienting. I'm interested in our music and listening is effected by the space that it happens in. We had everyone play the song from their phones at the same time, though it was off (which I liked better) so that when listening you'd experience different levels of reverberation, resonance, and dissonance.
Here's the piece, try to find some other people with computers or phones to listen to it with!

Here's some footage of me and Annie rehearsing