Songs for a Set

2022, Site-specific performance and installation

Designed by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, Portal is a thirty-six-foot-tall black tubular steel sculpture situated in front of the Cuyahoga County Justice Center which consists of the Cleveland Police Headquarters Building, the Cuyahoga County and Cleveland Municipal Courts Tower, and the Correction Center (Jail I), and Jail II. Portal is both reviled and revered since its installation in 1976, it has become an icon of the city’s civic core. Its pared-down form is deceptive because it shifts constantly as you circle it, framing and reframing the surrounding structures.

Portal serves as the instrument and site for Songs for a Set , a series of live music and sound performances as part of an ongoing engagement with the life and oeuvre of legendary composer, musician, ethnomusicologist, and teacher Halim El Dabh (born 1921 in Cairo; died 2017 in Kent, OH). A pioneer of electronic music, El Dabh taught at Kent State University for many decades and frequently performed in and around Cleveland. Inspired by El Dabh’s notes describing a 1969 proposal for an interactive sound work titled Piroutte Continuum which details instructions for a duet with a sculpture. Namy’s activation of Portal range from a selection of El Dabh’s own compositions to works developed collaboratively with artist M. Carmen Lane; Djapo Cultural Arts Institute drummers and dancers; Oberlin's Creative Music Lab and the Oberlin Improvisation and Newmusic Collective; dancers from Case Western Reserve Dept. of Dance; and amplified through the Steel Yard Sound System.

This orchestrated encounter between El Dabh and Noguchi resurrects not just El Dabh’s overlooked contributions to electroacoustic music as a composer, performer, and educator, but also invokes the “collaborative communion” between El Dabh, Noguchi, and the modern dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, who commissioned El Dabh to write the score and Noguchi to design the sets for her 1958 ballet Clytemnestra. At the FAVA Gallery in Oberlin, Namy presents an installation that includes archival material related to this collaboration and responds to this forgotten moment in the history of the postwar American avant-garde.