Saturday, June 8 at 1 pm and 4 pm

As part of the performance program organized by guest curator Taja Cheek for Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, Sarah Hennies presents Motor Tapes, a one-hour work for a large ensemble. Taking its name from neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás’s characterization of the human brain as containing innumerable “tape loops” that run continuously within the mind, Motor Tapes is composed of densely overlapping patterns of sound, with musicians representing synapses that both fire independently and work together to achieve complex activities. Llinás’s description of this phenomena is strikingly musical: “The activity in the basal ganglia is running all the time, playing motor patterns and snippets of motor patterns amongst and between themselves […] they seem to act as a continuous, random, motor pattern noise generator.” “I am interested in the motor tapes theory,” Hennies has said, “because it suggests that alongside lived experience there is a mysterious biological basis for our inclinations, talents and identities.”

Motor Tapes will be performed by Lauren Cauley, Laura Cocks, David Friend, Madison Greenstone, Judith Hamann, Tristan Kasten-Krause, Hannah Levinson, Christopher McIntyre, Erin Rogers, Brendon Randall-Myers, Bill Solomon, and Nate Wooley.

Motor Tapes was commissioned by GMEA - Centre National de Création Musicale d’Albi-Tarn and premiered by Ensemble Dedalus at the Darmstadt Summer Course in August 2023