Connie Beckley

Biography

"...Connie Beckley is a composer and performance artist of distinct individuality; her work is suffused with a cool methodology that can clarify emotion or confound it ... [her] performances occupy that elusive but powerful nether world between theater and music-- a form of small scaled but intense lyric drama that may some day soon blossom into full-dress opera."
-- John Rockwell, New York Times

Connie Beckley continues to occupy the above mentioned nether world. And the work has blossomed. Her special talent of composing music that illuminates her original texts by way of abstract visual ideas has become more theatrical in nature, yet no less thoughtful. This was apparent in her work entitled The Aquarium: A Meditation on Life in the City, premiered at Lincoln Center Festival 97. Her current work, “from: a masque in seven inventions,” while existential in its thinking, further emphasizes Ms. Beckley’s strong roots in art and music.

Ms. Beckley’s interdisciplinary sensibility was forged with her appearance as a singer and actor in the 1976 seminal production of Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson. As a classically trained composer and visual artist who had been told she had to choose between art and music, she rejected the choice and experimented with sound installations in conjunction with sculpture and performance. She coined the term "temporal sculpture" to distinguish her work from the more stage-oriented works of other performance artists.

For instance, in Spiral Cloud 1986, while a pianist played a theme and variations on a baby grand piano in an open field, surrounded by a tethered spiral of black helium balloons, she gradually released the balloons to form an evolving and rising spiral.

In The Funeral of Jan Palach, 1990, based on the dreamy, tragic poem by David Shapiro, singers became living sculptures within a set consisting mainly of light, one of her preferred materials.

Ms. Beckley has presented her work in both commercial and public cultural institutions throughout Europe and North America, including the New Music America Festivals, the Venice Biennale, the Paris Biennale, and the Museum of Modern Art. Reviews and articles appear in publications including The New York Times, Art in America, Arts, Artforum, Tel Quel, Flash Art, and Art Press. Her musical composition from The Aquarium, initially released by Steirischer Herbst Festival, Graz, Austria, has been re-released in New York by Composers Recordings, Inc.

Fellowships and Grants include

Norman and Rosita Winston Foundation 2002
Jerome Foundation 2000
New York Foundation for the Arts 2000
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship 1990-91
New York Foundation for the Arts 1986
National Endowment for the Arts 1978

Photo credits: Spiral Cloud – Gerald Weixler

Photo by Connie Beckley

Aquarium – Stephanie Berger

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