Benjamin Portzen is a composer, improviser, and movement artist who strives to make space for connection, healing, presence, and absence through immersive sound and movement works. By enabling performers and witnesses to be with time differently – often through alinear, cartographically-constructed scores – Ben offers the opportunity to create and interrogate relationships between bodies, ideas, sounds, and objects across, around, and through time. At present, Ben’s research interests include designing intelligent computer collaborators for composition and improvisation, illuminating the body as the locus of creative potential in the creation of sound works, the facilitation of “real” experiences for performers and audiences, and the ways in which artistic practice offers the opportunity for radical self-transformation and -dissolution.

Ben sees little boundary between artistic and religious practices, freely embracing the ritualism of repetition, and improvisation’s ability to put us in contact with the unknown by grounding oneself completely in the present. Ben’s work probes the liminal space between creativity and destructivity in search of ways in which art can help us live with greater depth, beauty, and grace.

Benjamin Portzen was generously supported by the Repsol Emerging Artists Award.