The Sheer Frost Orchestra (1993)
The Sheer Frost Orchestra had its first iteration in 1993 when Marina Rosenfeld was a student at CalArts and is her earliest work. A concept at the intersection of improvisation, performance, site specificity, and feminist strategies of collaboration and sociality, the Sheer Frost Orchestra has been an international phenomenon for almost thirty years, with unique ensembles mounting performances in locations as far-flung as Geneva, San Francisco and Tasmania. A performance of the Sheer Frost Orchestra is an event of indeterminate or variable length, deploying a highly formalized set of conditions: 17 (often amateur or non-specialist) female or female-identifying performers, 17 electric guitars laid end-to-end on the floor, 17 individual amps forming a wall behind the performers, and a hundred or more nail polish bottles dividing audience from stage (enough for each performer to have access to a variety of textured and sized glass bottles for sound-production). Participants are required to learn a set of one-fisted gestures deploying the bottles on the amplified strings of the instrument and a notational schema organized in 30- or 60-second increments. Importantly, at no time are the bodies of the instruments lifted to the body of the performers, or touched except through the mediation of the glass bottoms of the many nail polish bottles at hand. Participants adopt and explore these techniques in collective rehearsal. The work's identity could be said to be distributed across numerous local, temporary ensembles; scores customized to local conditions; and recorded traces in the form of cassette recordings, CD releases, and personal memorabilia (including scores, programs, expository and poetic writing generated by participants, and relationships formed in the course of participation).
