zugswang a)

Performance includes improvised music, video theater, and live feedback loops from personal devices.  3 performers needed, as well as projectors or large screens.  See score for further technical specifications.

Program Notes: 
"This piece is about feedback loops and the violence of the super-pristine hyper-realness of the digital.

I wanted to destroy the idea of the piano, expand the proscenium availability of the stage, and conflate the concepts of tool and instrument.

A zugzwang (purposefully misspelled/stylized/Americanized in the title) is a situation in chess in which a player is forced to make a move despite no

strategy existing that could prove beneficial. I recently came across a necklace from a company that hires local artisans from countries experiencing civil war to recycle bullet casings and bombshells and make them into jewelry. While tangential, it struck me as an apt metaphor for this piece; for if

the mediation, virtualization, and pop culture iconography to which we are subjected on a daily basis is a form of physiological harm, then the best way to combat it must be to make the immediate apparati of such violence into art.

Many thanks to Nick DiBerardino, Dr. Amy Beth Kirsten, and Dr. Thomas Patteson for their support and supervision.

-Maya Miro Johnson

December 2021

Text: from Marshall McLuhan, Jörg Laue, and Maya Miro Johnson"