3 ½

3 ½ — Kaleidoscopic. Anachronistic. Diffractive.

3 ½ is an anachronistic collage of instruments, voices, bodies, and technologies that co-compose one another across time, exploring the conditions through which performance can be experienced as a 'living score', one that breathes, hesitates, and transforms through unfolding negotiations. Drawing on posthuman and new materialist philosophies (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980; Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010), the work exists at the threshold between autopoietic 'selfmaking' and sympoietic 'making-with' (Haraway, 2016), staging the tension between inherited musical forms and distributed systems of relational emergence. Its purpose is to cultivate a kaleidoscopic gazing into simulation and hyperreality (Baudrillard, 1981), rendering perceptible sites of becoming, fragments of knowledge (Lyotard, 1979) and webs of asymmetrical relationships (Shildrick, 2022) by means of the permeable apparatus of grand piano, harpsichord, mezzo-soprano, and moving body, alongside motion capture, generative AI, live projection, and glitch-based sonic distortion. Created by an opera singer, harpsichordist, and dancer, the work enacts a dialogue between historical musical lineages and contemporary techno-performative systems, energizing Gluck's Orfeo ed Eurydice (1762) into a choreographic potential of sympoietic Partnership.

Classical repertoire, often treated as fixed and reverent, becomes metabolically reactivated through kaleidoscopic gazing in time, space, and perception. The apparatus co-constitutes assemblages of somaesthetic qualities (Shusterman, 2007) and interembodiment (Ahmed & Stacey, 2004), by continuously listening, responding, delaying, and distorting. At its core, the work engages with distributed formations to consistently refuse stable authorship or singular orientation, instead attuning to moments of misalignment, such as glitches, latency, and false synchronizations, which generate incipient new forms of relational energy. These negotiations respond to the tiny moments of losing trust or falling into doubt that could ruin the whole process, whilst enabling the performance to unfold between autonomy and co-creation, history and immediacy, without collapsing into isolated and separated Mastery.

About the artists

Anne Marleen Olthof, PhD-researcher 'Designing with the Body' at the University of Amsterdam and University of Antwerp, whose work seeks to develop advanced understandings of embodied knowing in the domains of Design, Robotics and Human-Computer Interaction. She investigates how 'open rehearsals' can serve as a modus operandi for interdisciplinary design practice at the intersection of artistic and scientific inquiry, and regularly cooperates with performers, musicians and dance artists of diverse abilities. Trained as an amateur mezzo soprano with opera conductor Annelies Prins in Schiedam, and in the Lichtenberger technique with choir conductor Niels Kuijer in Rotterdam. Participated in several Danceable projects at Holland Dance Festival, Danceable Symposium 2024, Stopgap Dance Company, Isadora Duncan Dance, and RAIVE AI summer school in 2024 and 2025.

Inesa Markava, PhD in Contemporary Art from the University of Coimbra, develops artistic mediation projects in the field of dance in museums in Portugal and Spain. Directed performances in 13 museums in the Leiria district as part of the award-winning project "Museum in the Village". Collaborated with the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Philharmonie Luxembourg. Teaches at the Higher School of Dance and the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria. Member of IETM, Brussels. Participated in the RAIVE AI Summer School, 2024.

Elena Khurgina is a harpsichordist with a focus on early and contemporary music, free improvisation, and interdisciplinary projects. In her artistic work, she explores the expressive potential of historical instruments within contemporary contexts. Elena is a first prize winner (2023) and jury member (2025) of the festival and competition for contemporary harpsichord music Prix Annelie de Man. In 2025/2026, she is participating in the stART.up program of the Claussen-Simon Foundation. She performs regularly at international festivals, including the International Bach Festival Hamburg, blurred edges, The Art of Improvisation, Bach & now!, WePresent, Fringify, and more, and develops innovative, harpsichord-focused educational projects for the Hamburg Open Online University and the Elbphilharmonie. Elena completed her Master's degree in Harpsichord at the HFMT Hamburg with Prof. Menno van Delft and Prof. Carsten Lohff and studied contemporary Harpsichord as part of the Erasmus program at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam with Prof. Goska Isphording.