KRISTIAN LARSEN

An Uneven Performance Archive

link to doctoral materials

Kristian Larsen: I am an experimental dance and electronic sound artist based in New Zealand working in improvisation and live performance. I am committed to research, development, and practice in improvisation ongoing in performance, interdisciplinary collaboration, and bodily movement techniques from the disciplines of contemporary dance, somatics, and combat systems. My genealogy of sound rooted in Musique Concrete, Noise, and indeterminism is entangled with non-idiomatic improvisation and pop music. My body of work is haunted by obsolescence. The body naturally decays as does sound So I continue to interrogate improvisation as as methodology of practice and thinking. Improvising in both dance and sound feels like sculpting smoke. The idea is clearly there in front of you swirling and moving. It can be inhaled, felt in the lungs, tasted in the mouth. But it lacks substance, it cannot be grasped or molded. The only thing that can be physicalised is the effect the smoke had on your body whilst it was in there.