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... As a result of this research the frontier between poetry and music no longer exists.
Henri Chopin
A dynamic partisan for new forms of expression in the arts, Henri Chopin has become something of an elder statesman in the realms of sound and concrete poetry. Indeed, Chopin was integral to the pioneering work in these fields, both as a primary producer and in the dissemination of the work of others. His work confounds our traditional understandings of poetry, transcending the bounds of the printed page through a synthesis of technological and corporeal elements to create "poems" which have reclaimed their presence on the material plane.
Word structures thought and thought structures reality...rub out the word. (William Burroughs)
Henri Chopin is a ventriloquist, throwing his voice the way a hunter throws spears, the way a potter throws pots. In his performance work he negotiates terrain Artaud referred to as "a kind of unique language halfway between gesture and thought." Chopin seeks to reconcile emotion with its expression, without recourse to the schizophonic effect of verbal translation. Chopin explores instead the primary sonic potentialities of the voice—it is the voice and not the verb that is the vehicle of expression. Speech is no longer a moribund doppelgänger, a pallid stand-in for some vague referent, but an object with real physical substance.
These works are performed without recourse to scores, they are instead reproduced and improvised wholly from memory. Chopin gasps and splutters and sighs and howls, he moans and groans, he casts spells. He gestures frantically throughout, with all the inspired desperation of Artaud's ''victim burnt at the stake, signalling thru the flames". Orchestrating the work, his contorted motions are directed