Live Drawings from North Sea Round Town 2021

The following is a collection of live drawings created at the North Sea Round Town Festival in Rotterdam that ran from July 2-9, 2021. As Artist-in-Residence at Goethe Institute Rotterdam/North Sea Around Town Festival held in June/July, I created a series of more than 50 live drawings mainly during drummer and Artist-in-Focus Sun Mi Hong's concerts.

• Sun Mi Hong Ensemble + dancers Dans Ateliers Rotterdam: "Dance in Four Colors" (Dans Ateliers, De Doelen)
• Sun Mi Hong/Henning Bolte, duo drumming drawing (Goethe Institute)
• Trio Harmen Fraanje/José Soares/Sun Mi Hong (Three Mountains Farm)
• Duo Sun Mi Hong/Alistair Payne (private residence)
• Hazard Ensemble (Laurenskerk)
• Annelie Koning's Blik (Worm)

These new live drawings were added to the Goethe-Institut exhibition which presented my artwork that had been created at several European festival over the past five years. It was a follow-up to my exhibitions in Wroclaw (2017), Katowice (2020, 2021) and Heidelberg (2020).

My live drawings are real time creations getting shape simultaneously with and within a live musical performance. There is no additional editing/elaboration after the performance. Every drawing is a visual trace of involved listening to that music and an engram of the experienced music making. Live drawing functioned in a 'documenting' role but also in the role of directly intervening in the music making itself as in the drumming-drawing duo with Sun Mi Hong.

In the duo setting, my drawing was projected onto a screen so it was visible for Sun Mi Hong and the audience. We both reacted directly to each other's actions, and became entangled in creating something that freely emerged in the moment. The two different forms of expression became inextricably connected in an autonomous piece (for this effect see a review of a recent staging of my live drawing in Mannheim, Germany).

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