Composer-performer Josh Spear’s research project “Composing Together and Not Together” delves into Intimacy as a condition for collaboration. He presents a single solo work made with director Oliver Dawe and artist Max Franks – the trio were all in the same year at school – as the culmination of his Artistic Research Fellowship at NMH. The work, made during 2021, draws on much of the material and processes from his research period and discusses queerness, the body, as well as the theatricality of music.
During his fellowship, he worked with his long-term composer-performer group “Bastard Assignments”, composer and theatre artist John Moran, as well as others from different disciplines including his own brothers and amateur performers like his ex-husband, to name only a few.
He hopes that in viewing how he works through the lens of Intimacy, new guiding principles concerning the very nature of collaboration have emerged that are useful not only to him but to the field more broadly.
