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The first words uttered in Camille Norment's new piece “Scattered Round - Elliptical Voices” are “and” and “with.” Or those were the first two I heard. The performance begins on the ground floor of the Munch Museum without announcing its own beginning. Performers scattered around the crowd began to speak, initially in whispers that could easily be confused for those in the audience making their final comments to other guests. Their volume is not that of a performer, but rather a discussant, and interlocutor. A din sets in that makes it difficult to discern the speech of each individual speaker, except perhaps the one incidentally closest to you. Most of the sonic surround is irreducible to its parts; even these two words that I was able to isolate speak of the existence of a wider surround. The conjunction “and” implies a multiplicity of parts without naming what they are; the adverb "with" implies an action undertaken as a group, without telling us exactly what is happening or who is doing it.
The performers, layering their voices in a para-semiotic surround, then ascend the staircase, leading the audience to the primary scene of Norment's ensemble performance. The first word she speaks is “bound,” allowing the plosive “B” to pop into the lassitude of the vowel compound, rounding out her mouth and rhyming with “sound.” As a word, it is a confounding one, equally signifying limitation and escape – one bounds beyond the bounds of one's capture. Both bondage and futurity are evoked in unison. One may be equally and simultaneously bound in the present by shackles or law or convention, while also bound to escape into freedom. Norment's repetition of the word appears to state and negate its meaning in rounds.
But even before she speaks, Norment is already communicating, exchanging charged and knowing glances with the performer's soma and vocal instrument she conducts. Although a one-off performance, one feels the depth of rehearsal coiled beneath the present, like a slinky. Norment orchestrates through eye contact, her face replete with warmth and suffusion in the collective sound, and then nods gently to indicate it is time for the performer to enter the next phase of the movement, whether that means turning around, approaching the center, or modulating volume. These transmissions shoot across the room, enfolding the audience in the sonic surround. Although we are never the recipient of Norment's communicative gaze, we are no less implicated as surfaces upon which the vibrations and feedback make their case.
There is something religious yet godless about the ecstatic build up of the sound. Norment herself plays several uncommon instruments, unrecognizable to the lay listener. The most visually elaborate is what looks like a glass-blown conical lathe with grooves in which Norment slips her wetted fingers. I later learn that the instrument is called a glass harmonica, or “hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica” meaning “harmonica to produce music for the soul by fingers dipped in water.” The device has a storied history – its current design adapted from Benjamin Franklin's – but fell out of fashion in the 18th century. Its disappearance is partly attributed to the difficulty of amplifying its sound so as not to be drowned out by other instruments. Norment's performance seemed to embrace, even invite such drowning. The sounds, which swell and soften at the application of pressure, are difficult to isolate or tease out from their imbrication with the voices of performers. A sonic contiguous whole is established for which the attribution of source becomes impossible. And though Norment stands in the center while her performers disperse within the aisles of a circular audience, her speech does not exceed the horizontal plane of blurry sound, nor rise to the level of a soloist. The choral surround is bigger than the attribution of its parts.
