Voyager: Lift Off!

Still on Cloud 9 (pun intended) after KUPG’s performance of Ben Justis’ Voyager at the Spencer Museum of Art last night. 

A 2 hour-long piece for percussion octet and fixed media, Voyager depicts the titular satellites’ journey through and out of our solar system.  

Sprawling, engrossing and captivating, Ben’s piece alternates between “Encounters,” depictions of the planets Voyager passes on its journey through the solar system, and Approaches.  Ben writes about the Approaches:

“To illustrate the vast distances and travel times between the planetary encounters, these [Approach] movements employ slow-moving, ambient backdrops and the performers disperse within the venue. Over time, the degree of musical structure decreases as the precise pitches, rhythms, amount of improvisation, synchronization, and even specificity of the instructions themselves are less and less controlled. This mirrors the drop in transmission strength received from the Voyagers which are so far away (over 13 billion miles) that the signal wattage received here on Earth is less than 20 billionths the power of a watch battery.”

We’ve been working the entire semester on this piece, with Bethany Amundson taking the reins in the Encounters.  We were so fortunate to be able to stage this work in the Spencer Museum of Art, the headquarters of KU’s inspiring and amazing Integrated Arts Research Initiative.  Adina Duke, Joey Orr, and Celka Straughn were so supportive Ben’s work and our invasion of their space.  

This experience was doubly enhanced by the presence of Knowledges, a tremendous new exhibit at the Spencer which argues that “creating art can also be a form of research that contributes to many fields of inquiry.” Amidst works by Assaf Evron, Danielle Roney, Fatimah Tuggar, and Andrew Yang, Voyager was recontextualized as a journey through Deep Time and Deep Space. (By the way, I fortunate enough to take part in the Spencer’s Colloquium and the A2RU conference, both of which made ample use of the gallery space.  Check it out if you get a chance, it’s amazing).

Thanks to 2x1 Media, we hope to share some documentation of this project with you soon!