Frozen Music/Pink Noise combines hypnosis, performance art, authentic movement and butoh, with the goal of interrogating interior states of being through movement and vocalizations, which reveal to the audience a \”negative space of an invisible architecture.\” The title Frozen Music refers to the quote: \”Ich nenne Architektur gefrorene Musik\” by Goethe that suggests architecture is frozen music. Ubik et al ask: What are the acoustics of that invisible building, where in the performers listen and move while in various states of hypnotic trance.

Frozen Music/Pink Noise a performance in 12 parts: foundation/ excavation/ ascension/ undergirding/ cantilever/ sheer/ reflection/ absorption/ sustain/ attack/ release/ decay; It is a new original work derived from workshops in a special process of improvisation while in trance. The ensemble of performers and designers developed this special process over a month long period of collaboration and it will be realized for the first time in the gallery before the audience. The principle creative artists of UBIKETAL (meaning: ubiquitous et al or: everywhere and everyone) include: Alan Tollefson, Michelle Lai, and Sarah Day, Max Baumgarten, Amara Gyulai, Jeff Worden, Dana Murphy, and Pearl Merril. Sound Design and accompaniment by Andy Sykora and Lighting design by Cameron Mock. Audience/performer separation will be minimal in this show as in environmental theatre with even some audience performer interaction. The setting will be the open space of the white cube/black box double with some scenic elements designed by Alan Tollefson.

The common denominator of the team UBIKETAL is intersubjective performance. Exploring ideas such as, witnessing, responsibility, language and embodiment. Performing in a trance achieved through a pre-performance ritual and guided visualization, in which each performer is prompted to find a specific personal interior location, or to begin a spontaneous dialogue with the unconscious through movement.

PinkNoise/Frozen Music is an intervention against habitual ways thinking and being. UBIKETAL hope to reintroduce the audience to a state of continual questioning while the unfamiliar unfolds.

After moving to Southern California Alan Tollefson was hired by the University of La Verne to teach Performance Art, Stage Craft and to be the Technical Director in the theatre arts department. Tollefson’s interest in theatre and construction has led to co-developing an experimental research group UBIKETAL that conceives projects in the rapidly growing field of Performative Architecture. Performative architecture explores the freedoms and limitations imposed on the individual by the built environment by testing performance through space design to gain a better understanding of how the body moves in space and how subjectivities are actualized. Performative architecture draws from the phenomenology of theatre and the physics of construction to develop a better understanding of embodied architecture and architectural metaphors that we live every day. Performative architecture uses the language of these metaphors to explore this system with both inside and outside, to redistribute power in system where subjectivities are situated within the built environment.

UBIKETAL is theorizing and realizing self-studying spaces as digitally reactive environments that use feedback systems to identify emergent behaviors. We are launching this endeavor with this project that galvanizes performance theorists and practitioners around the study of the unconscious as the archive of our embodied architecture. Our program Frozen Music/Pink Noise is a demonstration of our imagination let loose in the unconscious architectonic field.