Sound Observations Concert Series: Maggie Nicols (with Ivette-Roman Roberto)

Nameless Sound’s Sound Observations Series presents foremost artists in the world of creative music paired with some of Houston’s distinctive and renowned art spaces.

Friday, April 22, Maggie Nicols (pictured, photo by Frank White) performs within Dan Flavin’s icon installation in Richmond Hall. Nicols’s solo performance is followed by a first-time duo with Puerto Rican vocalist and performance artist Ivette Román-Roberto.

Maggie Nicols (Cardiff, Wales) – voice
Ivette Román-Roberto (San Juan, Puerto Rico) – voice

With a background in jazz, dance, and theater, Maggie Nicols became an early pioneer in the European free improvisation scene and one of the most unique vocalists of the avant-garde.

As a teenager, Nicols was performing as a dancer at London’s famous Windmill Theater. Her first singing engagement, at the age of sixteen, was at a strip club in Manchester. At around this same time, she became obsessed with bebop music, singing in pubs, clubs, hotels, and in dance bands with some of the finest jazz musicians in the UK. In the midst of all of this she worked abroad for a year as a dancer (including a six-month stint at the Moulin Rouge in Paris).

An encounter with John Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Ensemble sparked an immediate passion for improvisation. She was strongly attracted by a sense of transparency in the personal, emotional and social expression that she felt in the music. It’s a sense that was supported later by her activism and her interest in political philosophy. For Nicols, the improvisational ensemble is a communal unit. In her singing, the quick-responses so characteristic of British improvisation are felt as expressions of empathy and human connected-ness.

Nicols entered the ground-breaking European scene as one of its few women performers. Serious demeanors often kept humor at a distance and frowned-upon in this boys club. Feminism later nourished the humor and theatricality that became characteristic of much of Nicols’ work.

After a period of absence from the world of improvisation, Nicols formed the Feminist Improvisation Group (FIG) with bassoonist Lindsay Cooper. Their first performance was at a “Music for Socialism” event at London’s Almost Free Theater in 1977. FIG opened up a whole new set of opportunities for Nicols and her colleagues. Humor, largely forbidden in the previously male-dominated scene, sometimes took center stage.

Theatricality gave opportunities for direct political content. FIG began to express “lesbian sexuality” in their performances, challenging the norms of hetero-male performance through expressions of touching and intimacy on stage. Staged parodies of women’s roles overlapped with the use of everyday objects (like kitchen utensils) as instruments, thus undermining the hierarchies of musical virtuosity.

From Nicols’ activism to her engagement with art-as-therapy to her roots in the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, a workshop-practice has been key. Today, she continues by hosting The Gathering, a regular open improvisational meeting in Wales (where she currently lives). Though she is a veteran of this music and is recognized as the pioneer in her field, Nicols has only ever performed a few times in the United States.

She returns to Houston as a Nameless Sound artist-in-residence. She will be spending an intensive week with our teaching staff, conducting improvisation workshops in special needs communities and receiving Nameless Sound’s Resounding Vision Award.

We expect the live acoustics of The Menil’s Richmond Hall to be an exquisite setting for her one-of-a-kind vocal work.

Nicols will give a solo performance, followed by a first-time duo with Puerto Rican vocalist and performance artist Ivette Román-Roberto.

With a background in experimental theater as well as improvised music, and an investment in the therapeutic and community-building potential of her workshop practice, Ivette Román-Roberto has much in common with Nicols. Román-Roberto began her performing career in the 1980’s as a member of the experimental theater group LAPD (Los Angeles Poverty Department) in California.

She was a leading initiator of the “Performeros de los 90’s” movement in Puerto Rico.Román-Roberto had performed widely in Latin American and Europe before taking a short break from performance work in the 2000’s.

While living in Houston and getting involved in its experimental music scene,Román-Roberto returned to performance. Her expressive power, subtle theatricality and wide-ranging voice were a revelation to local audiences. In 2014,Román-Roberto returned to her native Puerto Rico. Since then she has become an important performer, teacher and organizer in San Juan.

Links:

Maggie Nicols
https://twitter.com/musicalmag
http://richard-scott.net/interviews/maggie-nicols/
https://eartripmagazine.wordpress.com/articles/articles-issue-5/gender-music-maggie-nicols/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggie_Nicols

Ivette Román-Roberto
https://www.youtube.com/user/tastontotu