by Andy Ingamells and Kathryn Williams
“Rejection brought Andy and I together a few years ago” says flautist Kathryn Williams, who performed a new collaborative work with performance artist Andy Ingamells at nonclassical on 20 March 2019. “We both performed in a fringe concert for people turned down by Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival Hub Shorts. I taught the audience a nursery rhyme about Thanksgiving and then played Brian Ferneyhough’s Unity Capsule. Andy showed a film – called Packaged Pleasure – while he physically replicated what was happening on screen with bells on his wrists and ankles.”
This was the first time that Kathryn and Andy met and, since then, they have been regular collaborators on a number of brilliantly odd projects that are as visual and theatrical as they are musical.
“The world of experimental music, and the legacy of Fluxus in particular, allows me to engage directly with other things that I like, such as humour, comedy and physicality. I can explore a broad range of sensations that music can offer beyond sound, but with the reduction and focus that experimental music offers,” Andy says. One of their early collaborations was a piece Andy wrote for Kathryn, entitled Long Piece. “It’s 42 metres long and requires her to run alongside it and read the music as fast as possible.”
At nonclassical on 20 March, they performed a new work created in unusual places, such as bathtubs, reed beds, gyms and leisure centres across the UK and Ireland. “The way that Andy and I work is a combination of rigorous enquiry and silliness in equal measure”, Kathryn says. “Our current artistic project is characterised by the profoundest investigations into the human soul. What happened 20 March emerged from that.”
Text taken from an interview with nonclassical.
Performances
20 March 2019, Nonclassical, London
28 May 2019, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester
7 September 2019, The Guesthouse, Cork
Score (click image for pdf of full score)
Andy Ingamells 