This month in Lisbon and Braga, pianist Joana Sá presents her new album, “Corpo-escuta / A body as listening”, part of a larger project that includes a book and an installation.
The presentation in Lisbon takes place on Friday at Culturgest, in what is the artist’s debut in that venue, while in Braga the performance takes place at gnration, on the 26th of this month.
The album, the third solo album in her career, is the first under the Portuguese record label Clean Feed, and is part of a wider project that began last year, including the book “A body as listening – resonant cartography of music (im)materialities”, published in November, a virtual installation – which can be visited at www.abodyaslistening.com -, a conference-performance, which has already taken place, and this show, in which he presents the album with the three co-creators: director Daniel Costa Neves, in visual design, choreographer and dancer Teresa Silva, in movement support, and musician and sound artist Henrique Fernandes, who will be on stage with Joana Sá, on the piano.
“A Body as Listening” is his solo debut on Clean Feed, a label for which he has already recorded with Greek singer Savina Yannatou, with the Turbamulta quintet in 2018 and with the Power Trio.
“In Joana Sá’s music, what strikes you first is the sound, a wonderful sound where the piano keys are just one part. Joana explores the whole instrument, extracting timbres from every piece of wood. Her compositional work and the rigor of her pieces are paralleled by her exploratory capacity and musicality of enormous interpretative beauty,” says Clean Feed editor Pedro Costa.
The composer told the Lusa news agency that her work is “very much linked to the question of the body”.
“My work is a deconstruction in relation to the body, and, in relation to music, of power relations, of conflict and, from here, of this idea, almost of an open wound or this space of conflict that is the body, a body that is not linear and that has multiple authorities, that is multiple and diverse, and things that we don’t control, and, in this deconstruction, perhaps the discussion of these times that try to be very geometric,” she said.
“But everyone sees things the way they feel,” he said, noting that it is “difficult to define” his music, but stressed that “nowadays the drawers aren’t watertight or closed, and things end up touching each other”, affirming his origins “in classical and contemporary music”.
“My music is within the contemporary area, also a little experimental, but it’s also music that tries to deconstruct this idea that we have of contemporary music as being something very rational or that you need to know a lot about music in order to understand it,” he told Lusa.
“It’s music that is very sensorial and direct, on the one hand, and can be very complex, and ends up deconstructing this idea of duality between what is intellectual and what is sensorial and immediate, more accessible to the senses.”
To Lusa, Joana Sá acknowledged that she is “a transgressor”, but stressed that she has “respect for the past”, for those who preceded her and “provided tools that are fundamental”.
