11 Fehu
Picture
Possessions
Paul Zmolek

Originally solely a dance artist/educator in training and temperament, my approach has continually expanded in outlook beyond any neatly defined discipline genre to become truly transdisciplinary, taking whatever form within whatever media that is required of the work. I am most interested and find delight in collaborative efforts. My colleagues and students have become familiar with my catch phrase, "just solve the problem" and answering "yes" to either/or questions about how they could approach a creative solution.

I have enjoyed teaching and creating work with all ages from pre-school through graduate students as well as established, mature artists of all backgrounds in locations across the U.S., Europe, Australia and the internet.
Appropriately, my decision to create a work in response to the Possessions runescore was made in response to late withdrawals from the project by some collaborators and my concern that we did not possess enough responses to the scores for the installation to be as effective as it could be.
Over the years we have accumulated quite an assortment of percussion instruments that mostly sit and gather dust in two corners of my office space (on either side of the wall of stacked lanterns in storage from our Illuminating Site: Birdsong, patiently waiting the next incarnation of that project).

As my other sound responses to the rune scores have been text-based, I decided to make use of these instruments in some manner.

Striving not to over think my responses, I quickly grabbed the first instrument that I thought of in response to the five word prompts that accompany each of the fifteen actions runes and played them (rather poorly as instruments gathering dust are rarely practiced) for the designated time brackets.

Once the sound score was in place I gathered the instruments I utilized for the accumulation video of the work.

Jo was working in her adjacent studio to expand the installation content with an additional rune score response. A brief vocal exclamation expressing her frustration with Final Cut may be heard at the beginning of my video.