Postcards by Alexina Hawkins

Distinct in their respective manner of composition and final acoustic expression, these three pieces nevertheless play well together; each piece painting a different affective hue and allowing for Hawkins’ varied performance capacities to be heard.

The first piece, Events can be traced, but also leave traces (L. Tasca), is a disciplined, somewhat austere work that is logically exact in its unfolding and progression. It is not, as this might suggest, authoritarian. There’s a generosity in its openness to and active engagement with the indeterminacies of live performance. Tasca´s work in general gives expression to the contingent by creating these opportunities for and incorporating the incidents of live performance - i.e. the unintended and accidental.

Colombia graduate Fjola Evans’ piece, Ripples, in some contrast to the ascetic reductions of the first piece, is more vociferous, building as it does from cold beginnings to a fiery crescendo. The most ´fizzy´ of the three pieces, it supplies a welcome bridge between the managed intensity of Events and the playful, riffy material comprising Hiromo Seifert’s Postcards. Working as a jazz drummer and producer in addition to composition, Seifert´s piece combines the plucked and the bowed to great effect, balancing elements of relative light and dark through its whimsical first section up to the weightier closing sections.

In sum: It’s a promising, enlivening show from a focused and eclectic instrumentalist.

- E

Australian violist, currently based in Berlin, Germany.

alexinahawkins.com