Nancy Tam
Sound Artist Nancy Tam 譚亦斯 works and lives on the lands of the Coast Salish peoples. Her practice is collaborative, often modelling after devised theatre processes with sound and performance as primary media. Her current research triangulates between sound, space, and body to investigate notions of horizontality and peripherality in the context of immersive spatial and sonic designs.
As a teen she listened to birds and bugs then in 2012 she made ‘…wreckage upon wreckage…’, a durational performance installation where she continuously produces and moults biodegradable plastic skins. In her twenties, the moving patterns of headlights casted onto pillars under bridges during her twilight walks, led Nancy to her audiovisual and choreographic work ‘Walking at Night by Myself’ (2019). In the last few years, Nancy found kinship and collaboration with Robyn Jacob and Derek Chan, inspiring Nancy to deepen her connection with her cultural identity through ‘Double Happiness’ (2022). This research project resulted in a music album ‘Twinned Spirits’, a 30-minute short film ‘A Little Detour’, and a theatricalized song cycle ‘Detour This Way’. At present, Nancy is an aspiring farmer, and a daily ocean-swimmer. She infuses these knowledges and practices into creating her outdoor roving listening project ‘ROOST’, where she investigates the embodied phenomenon uncanny-valley-of-haptics with AR audio.
Nancy is a founding member of A Wake of Vultures, Five Blessings, and Fathom Sounds.
Design Work
Walking at Night by Myself
Projection Designer: Danial O’Shea, Costume Designer: Nellie Gossen, Sound Designer: Nancy Tam,
Performers: Anjela Magpantay and Jasmine Chen, Movement Consultant: Lexi Vajda, Giselle Liu,
Excerpt was filmed by: Lukas Hyrman, Produced By: A Wake of Vultures
Artist Statement
I am a third culture kid belonging to the global diaspora of ethnic Chinese originating from Hong Kong, and I am also embedded as a settler in Canada. As such I am positioned in a third space—a rare position to hold in between both cultures; a convergence and synthesis of these identities. This in-betweenness informs my core values, which calls me to practice rigorous curiosity, attentive observation, and self-reflexivity within the shifting personal and artistic arenas that I navigate. I work interdisciplinarily with sound and performance as my primary media, and I am constantly switching roles between designer, composer, director, producer, etc.
Diversity permeates my artistic practice as nuanced and practiced ethics that extends beyond representation. I believe that we simultaneously are and are not bound by our bodies, our cultures, and politics applied onto us. As well as championing POC, our cultures, and shared experiences through creating narrative-based ethnographic work, I engage with a diversity of ideas, methodologies, and presentational forms. To date, I have made four ethnographic works, most notably ‘Double Happiness’ inclusive of a music album, a 30-minute short film, and a theatricalized song cycle. Sounding two parallel histories, this work winds through complexities of the Chinese diaspora by tracing migration paths of two families, connecting both shores of the Pacific using live music in a multimedia performance.
People-of-colour need to make work utilizing a range of different concepts about a multiplicity of subjects that participate in a variety of genres presented through a diversity of forms. By actively engaging with a robust roster of collaborators, I harness skills and knowledge from a myriad of perspectives, equip myself with conceptual, methodological, and artistic tools against habitual and self-imposed tokenization. I belong with three art collectives. A Wake of Vultures, Five Blessings, and Fathom Sounds are my main vehicles for current artistic output.
In 2018, through my collaboration with dance company MACHiNENOiSY, we were in residency at Annantalo where I was part of Helsinki Design Week, leading two workshops in sound design and soundscape composition. During this time, I engaged in transdisciplinary research in consultation with architect and theorist Juhani Pallasmaa. This collaborative research in architecture, sound, and choreography led to Fragile Forms, a large-scale roving performance where the dancers and my live sound design activated the Anvil Centre in New Westminster as part of the PuSh Festival 2018. In the 10,275 sqft street-level convention centre and atrium I use field recordings and soundscape composition as ways to suggest spatial and social assemblages—urban, rural, private, public, etc.—to engage with notions of space, time, and social grammars.
Designers—as do composers, directors, choreographers, filmmakers, etc.—think through composition. By utilizing compositional, improvisational, and performance techniques from my various backgrounds—music, sound design, film sound and foley, collective creation, theatre, and live art—I regard design as a multi-modal compositional practice that operates within different contexts interpreted through various media. Multi-modal composition inspires art-making in an encompassing way that blurs preconceived formal disciplinary delineations.
Walking at Night by Myself—an interdisciplinary collaboration between costume design, projection design, choreographic design, and live-performed octophonically spatialized sound design—responds to the notion of synthesis by utilizing moiré, the interference pattern perceived by the human brain when two repetitive patterns of similar frequencies are overlaid on top of one another. A projection of a dotted grid interacts with the striped patterns printed on the costume, so when the performer slightly shifts her torso the moiré pattern changes. Aurally, moiré is induced by metronomic sine tones dancing through loudspeakers around the audience. As the pitches detune, we perceive different partials of tones amplified or nulled by the acousmatic limits of the physical architecture.
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