The Practice of Love | Jenny Hval

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In her enigmatic avant-pop excursions, Jenny Hval breaks free from rigid concepts of sex, mortality, biology and pop culture. Her work occupies a zone between performance art and pop in similarly revolutionary fashion as Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love and Laurie Anderson’s Big Science. With her new project, The Practice of Love (TPOL), Hval takes one step further into a multidisciplinary, immersive performance between music, literature, and theatre.

About The Practice of Love

With her new project, The Practice of Love (TPOL), Hval will take one step further into a multidisciplinary, immersive performance between music, literature, and theatre. It will be based on material from Hval’s album, which was released on September 13, 2019, but it will not be a concert based on this album. Rather, it will explore both sonic, visual, and choreographical ideas in order to stage the writing process as a performative practice.

The piece begins by examining the material on the new album. A lonely protagonist sits in a seemingly empty room. She is constantly thinking, writing or playing, and then she starts speaking and singing about what appears to be herself, but a self that constantly transforms into other shapes: an adult version of Alice in Wonderland, or artists such as Kathy Acker, Agnes Varda, Joni Mitchell, and Georgia O’Keeffe, or various animals, or even the clappers of a church bell.

With this wordplay, the protagonist tries to open a portal or enter a trance-like state, using her limited means of a voice: a computer and a synth. What she is also doing, is creating a soundscape that references trance, as in trance music and dance music from the early 90s. Into this soundscape, a set of visually projected words start appearing, slowly transforming the space into a living canvas for language and voices.

As the protagonist gets immersed into the music, the piece also becomes immersive for the spectator. Projected written text redefines the space and becomes more and more creative and visual, creating a choreography of meaning and nonsense, lights, colors, and patterns. More people appear on stage, dismantling the role of the protagonist into a series of shifting central figures in an attempt to bring sound, body, and text closer together.

In this way, TPOL creates an experience of transfiguration, transforming roles, bodies, and sounds into text, and transforming different types of text into magic. By allowing the theatre to become writing, (which could be seen as the most “distanced” element on stage – normally, writing would be mostly used in the preproduction of a performance, as a script, a prescription, separated from the ritual itself), the performance can fail, but still try, to explore the potential for magic.

The practice of love is the practice of language. The practice of language is the practice of magic. The practice of magic is the practice of love.