Personæ Fiona Xue Ju

Personæ is a multimedia project for two dancers, flute, cello, live electronics, sensors, and video art. Since the pandemic, we have spent more time being alone with ourselves. We had the time to rediscover and reconnect with ourselves. Personæ reveals an experience of being alone, dissociating or associating, a sense of presence, and a journey of reconciliation with oneself. The body has both physical and spiritual dimensions that connect with our embodied cognition and consciousness. The body has multiple attributes and its roles are diverse. In Personæ, the different approaches in music and choreography, such as spatialization of sounds, harmonics, intonations, and scale system in music, kinesphere and kinematic parameters of movement in dance are applied to link the body and sound, as well as convey the connotation of the concepts.

Composition, concept, production, live electronics, video art: Fiona Xue Ju

Dance, Choreography: Moe Gotoda, Pingcheng Wu

Cello: Carmen Kleykens Vidal

Flute: Hannah Wirnsperger

Video filming: Taizhi Shao

Fiona Xue Ju (*1996): Born in Qingdao, China, Xue Ju (Fiona) spent her early years in Shanghai at the Middle School affiliated to the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where she studied both piano performance and composition. She later moved to the United States where she obtained a Bachelor’s degree in composition from Oberlin Conservatory. Currently, Fiona pursues her education as one of the members in master program CoPeCo in Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Lyon. As a contemporary music composer, improviser, and producer, she created a variety of music for chamber ensembles, installations, dances, interdisciplinary projects, and multimedia collaborations. Her music has been praised for its “fresh-sounding ideas” and described as “aurally fascinating” (Cleveland Classical). She is interested in how sound as a medium combines with different art forms to transfer electronic music from the virtual digital area to the physical performance space.