Jess Aszodi is a literal shape-shifter. An artist, researcher, educator, performer and kinkster, her vocal body is critically acclaimed in performances on stages across the world. Jess’ musical work crosses between classical and experimental music, and improvisation. She creates bespoke techniques and concepts from project to project and has built up a truly idiosyncratic set of embodied knowledges, from cycling while singing, to impact affected song, singing into orgasm, and a not small number of extremely extended vocal techniques. In recent years her compositions have focused on interdisciplinary, participatory theatre for bodies.
Jess has twice been nominated for the Australian Greenroom Awards as ‘best female operatic performer’ – in both the leading and supporting categories. She was awarded 2019 “Performance of the Year” by the Australian Art Music Awards. She has performed as a soloist with opera houses and ensembles around the world including the London Sinfonietta, Wiener Volksoper, Ensemble Moderne, Nederlands Reisoper, Hamburg Staatsoper, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide Symphony Orchestras, ICE, Pinchgut Opera, the Tirolean Symphony Orchestra, Victorian Opera, Sydney Chamber Opera, and the San Diego and Chicago Symphony Orchestras. Her Festival appearances include the Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide Festivals, Darmstadt, Aldeburgh, Tectonics, Tanglewood, Klangspuren, and Beethoven Festwoche.
Jess completed a Doctorate of Music at Griffith University, and a Masters in Fine Arts at University of California. Her thesis and subsequent publications have focused ways of embodying knowledge with and through the voice. Her current research is focused on the materiality and politics of sex-positive embodied arts, and she’s enthusiastically engaged in the task of teaching and refining the method she has created to reflect this research “dialectical voice work”.
LISTEN / SOUND & MUSIC
BEHOLD! the Triangle: musical bodies as erotic instruments
This workshop uses that most elemental of musical instruments, the triangle, as a metaphor for thinking about the relationship between music, somatic collaboration and the erotic body. The triangle “sings “upon impact. It must be held firmly, but with its body free to resonate. It’s a single piece of metal whose corners bend inwards as if trying to complete an impossible closure. It’s the rhythmic interaction between player and object that creates something we want to stop and listen to, something meaningful. This is a workshop for trios, established or newly formed. In groups of 3 we will be in a near constant state of “switching” – deciding, expressing, and instrumentalizing one another. In the first part of the workshop we will learn some techniques for making music with our voices and bodies, as well as for “ensemble communication” – the beautiful ways musicians make decisions without words or planned hierarchies. In the second half we will create a semi-improvised erotic art work with and upon each other’s musical bodies.