Thinking through ‘Voyeur Piano’: Strategies and outcomes for an artistic research project in musical performance

ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine a performance project I conducted in 2014 at the ‘Infecting the City’ festival in Cape Town: I performed on a piano, situated outdoors in Cape Town’s inner city; the audience observed from the street and from a nearby rooftop, where the music was relayed and amplified through speaker systems. I conceived this project, ‘Voyeur Piano’, to challenge traditional conceptions of South African concert halls, which I argue are characterised to a large extent by elitism, exclusivity and limitations in terms of access, but also in order to search for ways in which piano music may be used as an aesthetic and interventionist vehicle in site-specific and public art contexts. ‘Voyeur Piano’ is ‘read’ as an experimental system (Schwab 2014), and interrogated by means of a self-reflexive approach (Archer 2010). As both performer of the project and author of this article, I attempt to engage retrospectively with knowledge generated in and through this performance project.