Intricate and vocally driven, my work spans textural landscapes from song to sound. Within this terrain my voice is a vessel of physical and cultural memory; its vibrations transmit and materialize inner and outer worlds.
My grandfather was a Broadway producer and I grew up regarding musical theater as personal folklore. As a child, I wrote and directed my own musicals. As a young conservatory musician, I became steeped in the 20th-century experimentalism of John Cage, Luciano Berio, György Ligeti, and others. Tones, textures and dissonances took root in flesh and marrow. I began to explore these new textures through my body.
For the past 10 years I have created spaces of deep listening; spaces for bodies to co-exist in sensual atonality, and to converge in more conventional harmonic catharsis.
Vibration anchors me in the work of sensing and feeling–particularly, the ways my own Jewish ancestral songs are entangled in projects of assimilation, appropriation, erasure and yearning for a mythic frontier.
Through excavation, and in dialogue with my collaborators, vibration guides us in the intergenerational work of transforming and reshaping present time.
Oh… I know
I know I feel it often times I do
but is it more than a feeling?
-Talya Epstein as “stranger” in Private Country
To read more about my evolving reckoning and how my work contains historical violence, read: Fault Lines Tremble: A Conversation with Tatyana Tenenbaum by Tara Sheena for Culturebot