Gazelle Twin: ‘Absent Sitters was born out of the fascination with a seance’

Absent Sitters is described as a virtual seance in which an online audience will be guided by a performer medium to investigate what is live performance in 2020.

Musician, composer and performer Elizabeth Bernholz, aka Gazelle Twin, developed the work in collaboration with the artist and film maker Kit Monkman and Ben Eyes and Jez Wells at the University of York Music Department.

“It has kind of transformed over time,” Bernholz says. “We’ve been working on it since last October. We’ve had a year of lots of research and development, lots of meetings and interesting conversations and tests with the technology.

“The scope for it was quite wide. York Mediale were very kind to commission something that didn’t necessarily have a set outcome, so we had a really wide framework to work with but we knew that it would be centred around performance and to some degree music.”

The premise built on Bernholz’s holistic approach to music-making. “The way that I create music isn’t just to write it and perform it, there’s a lot more to it. There’s a story behind it, there’s usually a persona and a theme,” she says. “The premise initially was to use that concept and work with these wonderful other artists in creating something that was like a new art form.

“Over time we experimented with all sorts of things. Our early talks were about virtual experiences and using virtual reality tech, which is something that Kit uses in his work sometimes, he works mostly with screen-based visuals and also public art experiences using screen-based technology and also a lot of musical technology. In my work I use vocal augmentation, or electronic equipment to alter my voice, so we were just messing around with that for a good six months, having a lot of fun.”

By the start of 2020 they had decided to focus on “performance without a performer”, developing an idea that Bernholz had done once before based on “a piece of music for performance without me being present performing it, so having other performers but also my voice being present in the music itself”.

“This is something that I trialled a few years ago and it worked really well, so we returned to that but the idea that there would be a completely absent performer but the audience would be present. This is an idea we’d had way before the pandemic, so in January when it hit it was quite uncanny because we’d been talking about using an empty theatre based in York with a small, very select audience based on the stage rather than in the auditorium. They’d have this empty space where a performance would happen through various bits of technology, through speakers and radios so it would be coming in from another place. This idea was born out of the fascination with a seance and collective summoning of something.

“They’re very performative things when you look at the structure of them. There’s loads of controversy around them as well, mediums as performers and con artists, but there’s also this really interesting technological stuff as well where it plays with the idea of transmitting music and voice through radio and picking up signals.”

In the wake of Covid-19 restrictions ruling out all but a small number of socially distanced concerts, the concept became eerily prescient. Berholz says: “In January we were actually all in the University trying out vocal experiments and on that day the new hit of the pandemic. Actually there was a case picked up in York that day, and it was a really strange, darkening world which didn’t really slow down from that point.

“After a bit of a break while we all had to isolate we realised that this piece was completely (related to) what had been happening, with musicians having to perform through live streams. It had suddenly become this new – hopefully temporary – version of the industry. So we began to adapt this idea to become a completely online experience but still using all the concepts and the aesthetic and the general idea to create a collective summoning but without being able to have an audience present together in a physical space.”

By deconstructing live performance, Absent Sitters seeks to make the audience question what they are witnessing. “I would say the whole thing really is an experiment,” Bernholz admits. “We don’t know if it will work or not. There’s a certain flatness to experiencing something like that online, it’s something we’re all aware of and what we’re trying to do is just see how we can shape the experience to be a little bit more reflective, rather than just plug and play, join this live performance with your headphones on in your dressing gown and then get on with your life having dinner, or something.

“We’ve tried to make it more of an event and something that people can commit to a little bit more, so there’s more that they invest in this experience that is really making their role more essential. Rather than just being an anonymous viewer, they will be part of this and they will see other people that are taking part whilst they’re experiencing it.

“We’re trying to experiment with having a sense of a presence, more of a collective presence that you get at a gig or a concert but in this very different, very strange way. Without giving away too much, it will not be a traditional performance, it will be almost like a sort of ghost of a performance, what we’ve all been missing since March as performers and as people who like to experience live music.

“There’s a lot going on but we also don’t know how it will turn out, which is kind of exciting.”

Having decided not to tour this year, as she was due her second child, Berholz says she has not found lockdown “too big a life change”. But, she adds: “I think creatively there was a numbness for a while, just shock, really. I described it to a friend as it’s a bit like a slow trauma. I am fortunate, in my situation where I’m still able to work and haven’t had too much work taken away from me or lost income, but I’ve got a small boy as well and just the whole sudden life change and sudden readdressing of life and freedom and everything was a big shock, but creatively I know it will be quite a rich thing for most people eventually. I think it just takes time to process and live through it and then make some kind of sense of it. It’s the only thing I think we can do as musicians or artists or writers, we’re going to have to make sense of it somehow through our work. It’s essential, really.”

Costume, which formed such an important part of Bernholz’s previous projects such as Unflesh and Pastoral, might be absent from her latest work, but she says: “I can think of it as being a different thing here. Maybe my costume is being invisible, coming out through a speaker or something or on screen. I think this project has the capacity to one day become a physical performance in some way.

“Initially I was really interested in the idea of creating a virtual persona, as cringey as it might sound and it’s been done quite a lot already in certain corners of Silicon Valley, but I like the idea of an entity that existed in a completely different realm and I might still look into that one day.

“I always wanted the Gazelle Twin thing to be quite fluid where it might be me in costume one performance or one tour and then another it will be other people in costumes or it will be a completely different format. In a way it’s always good to create something that is distant, that can be on its own without me being puppetmaster of it. I like the idea of things going off and having their own life away from me but having my DNA in them.”

Bernholz’s original concept for Gazelle Twin grew out of her desire to make a statement with her music. “It was not just a musical statement, in fact I already knew what kind of statement I wanted to make musically,” she says. “The issue I had with trying to make that as a young female performer was actually a problem for me, I couldn’t embody my music in the way I wanted to when I wanted to perform it.

“I was writing quite heavy, large-scale, cinematic, intense music and I felt it needed something else to be able to deliver that, that was one of the reasons why I decided that costume was something that was a very powerful way to step aside from yourself, you can become anything really that you want. That also ended up playing into the idea of gender and identity and all the politics that you get with that in music especially as a female artist. It became a pivotal statement for me for all the projects that I’ve done because often that’s been the central theme of it.”

Eventually Bernholz hopes to turn the musical elements of Absent Sitters into an orchestral work. “This project could grow into something much bigger, and in a way more traditional as a piece of music and as a performance, but I think retaining the same atmosphere,” she says. “There is a plan for me to do something but I don’t know how connected it will be. I think all of us involved in this version are hoping that we can augment it slightly if things change next year so that we can maybe try the theatre idea that we had initially or have something that takes place in different venues. We’re really open with it being at the moment quite an experimental project. It will be really interesting to start in this way and then see how that can filter into the resuscitated live music scene, if it happens.”

Absent Sitters runs at York Mediale from 21-25 October. yorkmediale.com