I have collaborated on a number of works in the last few years in which elements of physical, musical and text improvisation were used to try things out and shape the work during the process of creating it. Following is a description of some of those pieces.

"Pope Joan" - a dance-opera by Anne LeBaron, composer and Mark Taylor, choreographer. This production was a co-commission of Dance Alloy and the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. In the process of several workshop periods I worked intensively with the Dance Alloy company dancers on vocal production, since Anne LeBaron wished to use them as a chorus in the piece. The company also worked with me on movement to find out how much I could move and be moved by them and still be able to sing. I was eventually choreographed into 4 of the 5 movements of the piece.

"Cassandra"- part of a New York cabaret evening - collaboration with Eric Salzman, composer and Eva Salzman, poet/librettist - a modern monologue from Cassandra, a woman who is cursed with the ability to see the future but is never believed. Erik Salzman wrote the music and I developed the sound processing and improvisatory elements in the piece, using MAX/MSP (a computer sound processing program) for realtime digital signal processing of the voice.

"Warum Kuessen die Menschen?" - with Hannah Hänni, composer/vocalist and Suzanne Castelberg, live video. Created for the EAR WE ARE festival in Biel, Switzerland. Text by Helmut Eisendle. Hannah Hänni developed a palidrome score in which our improvised vocals and electronics were alternated between taped scientific texts describing the muscular changes that happen in a human face as it goes through varying emotions. In those spoken sections Suzanne Castelberg's focused her camera on my face and enlarged the image to fill the entire screen, as I tried to duplicate what the scientific texts were describing. The effect was both comic and unsettling.

"Heilige und Helden" with Theater Meyerhold (Vienna) for the Malta Theater Festival in Poland. This was a production of several short music theater works including Judith Weir's King Harold's Saga and Herstory III, a monodrama by american composer Elizabeth Vercoe on Joan of Arc. The director was Renate Pitschoff, who trained in Russia in the Meyerhold tradition of bio-mechanics, a physical actor training technique developed by Vsevolod Meyerhold in the Soviet Union in the 20's which emphasizes breaking stage action into the beats and phrases of physical motion. We worked in an improvisatory way to develop both the physical patterns and the staging.

"Venture to Venus" with Norwegian violinist/composer Hege Rimestad and norwegian dancer/choreographer Steffi Lund. Blackbox, Oslo, was a dance-theater work that encorporated both physical and musical improvisation into the piece, as well as composed and choreographed works by both Hege and myself.

"SoundSites" is an ongoing project initiated by Kristin Norderval consisting of collaborative works developed with other composers, performers and visual artists seeking to explore the unique acoustic and visual characteristics of various geographic locations. First in the series was "Lydavtrykk" (sound-print) - urban sounds and sites from Oslo Norway — an installation and performance created with violinist/composer Hege Rimstad, percussionist Margit Schoberleitner and photographer Manuela Schreibmaier. Using the river Aker that runs through Oslo as a primary focus, impressions of the city were collected through photographs and through recordings of on-site improvisations and ambient sounds in unique acoustic locations. Improvisations at Oslo’s main water processing plant, an abandoned silo, a construction site, and other locations along the river were used to create a sound installation that combined machinery, water, city sounds, operatic singing, trash percussion and the influences of Norwegian fiddle traditions. Homage was paid to the river as a lifeline through Oslo’s industrial past and Oslo’s present. Samples of the recorded ambient sounds were also used in a live electro-acoustic concert presented at the Oslo jazz club BLÅ, which is located on the banks of the river Aker.

"Ionische Fraktate" Operatorium für Tonband, Gesang und Stimmen by Martina Cizek - an outdoor performance for voices and electronics at the Theseustempel, Volksgarten, Vienna, in collaboration with Das Kunsthistorische Museum. My vocal improvisations on texts by Sappho were recorded by the composer, woven into the fabric of the previously composed electronic score, and then processed by the composer to acheive a very personal kind of interaction between the electronic and the live portions of the performance.