sin rumbo, created as part of Crespo Pardo’s 2023-24 Roulette Residency, is an ode to wandering and waiting, a participatory solo piece featuring voice, movement and moving image. Crespo attempts to find flexibility within fixed frameworks, holding moments of collective respite, and reflecting their cyclical transformations.
The piece consists of a prelude and two simultaneous scores. Crespo arrives through open, augmented and inhibited movement, leaving behind sonic artifacts. The first score consists of poems, melodies and sounds exploring Crespo’s relationship to entities outside and within themselves. The second is a moving image score. In 2022, Crespo asked fourteen friends to go on solitary walks in their respective cities and document their perspectives through first-person videos. The juxtaposition of these scores creates a landscape which is at once crowded and withdrawn. In sin rumbo, Crespo invites others into the interruption, the pause, the space between cycles. And in this negotiation with momentum, Crespo searches for something beyond/between the comfort of limits and their innate need to be directionless.
“[Crespo’s] voice is lifted, a captivating beacon that pulls us together.”
– Foxy Digitalis
A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing. Watch below or on YouTube.
Isabel Crespo Pardo (they/them) is a NYC-based latinx vocalist, improviser-composer, and interdisciplinary artist. Their work actively entangles music, visual art, text and performance, always evolving to reflect the intra/interpersonal spaces they inhabit. Reveling in soft chaos, they embrace openness and specificity to create poetic work(s).
For Crespo, art is a place to gather, to exercise intuition, rigor and delight. They are deeply invested in building generative structures and intentionally inviting others into focused explorations. Most recently, they released el rostro (des)cubierto, a collection of eight deeply intimate pieces weaving composition and improvisation together to explore self and sociality. The development of this music required embracing the challenge of patiently listening to one another, striving towards interdependence, & reveling in all that it requires. They wrote this music for Afarin Nazarijou (qanun), Skyler Hill (guitar), and SeaJun Kwon (bass).
Crespo’s main compositional vehicle is sinonó, a poemsong trio featuring themself (voice), Lester St. Louis (cello), Henry Fraser (bass). sinonó is a brief submergence, a string of choices, a container for the communion of rigor and failure. The trio has performed together for two years, and will release their debut album, la espalda y su punto radiante in early 2024. In November 2022, Crespo premiered 6., a six-week interdisciplinary installation piece featuring close collaborators Loré Yessuff, Eden Girma, Kwami Winfield, Chris Williams, and Lester St. Louis, at Roulette Intermedium as part of their 2022 Van Lier Fellowship. Making use of screen printing, sculpture and sound, the performance activated contemplation of community and improvisation. In June 2022, they drip, drip, a co-created site-specific piece with edi kwon in the catacombs of the Green-Wood Cemetery. Inspired by this historic space and sharing in each other’s grief and light, the duo crafted a ritual of transformation through improvisation, dance, poetry, and the use of found objects. In May 2022, they premiered desbordándome, an evening-length large-scale embroidered graphic score composed for sinonó. In this piece, they explore themes of change, interconnectedness, and failure, as well as the expressive and sonic potential of words.
Crespo is consistently involved in collaborative projects. Presently, they are a member of tilt (with Kalia Vandever and Carmen Q. Rothwell), tombstar (with edi kwon, Zekkereya El-magharbel, and Lesley Mok), Chatterbox (with Jolee Gordon and Priya Carlberg), and chululu (with Stephani Borgani). They will participate in Anna Abondolo and Jon Starks’ ORDER at HERE Arts Theatre in August 2023. They collaborated as a vocalist-improviser on SECONDARY, a five-channel video installation written and directed by Matthew Barney. This ensemble piece was developed in the collaborative environment of improvisational workshops with movement director David Thomson and composer Jonathan Bepler. The 60-minute piece was on display at Barney’s studio in Spring 2023.
“sin rumbo” was developed as part of Isabel Crespo Pardo’sRoulette 2023 Residency, made possible with funds provided by the Jerome Foundation. This performance is presented through Roulette’s GENERATE program, providing over 30 artists each year with in-depth creative and technical support.
photos by Nathalie Basoski
Isabel Crespo Pardo: sin rumbo
Monday, September 25, 20238:00 pm
sin rumbo, created as part of Crespo Pardo’s 2023-24 Roulette Residency, is an ode to wandering and waiting, a participatory solo piece featuring voice, movement and moving image. Crespo attempts to find flexibility within fixed frameworks, holding moments of collective respite, and reflecting their cyclical transformations.
The piece consists of a prelude and two simultaneous scores. Crespo arrives through open, augmented and inhibited movement, leaving behind sonic artifacts. The first score consists of poems, melodies and sounds exploring Crespo’s relationship to entities outside and within themselves. The second is a moving image score. In 2022, Crespo asked fourteen friends to go on solitary walks in their respective cities and document their perspectives through first-person videos. The juxtaposition of these scores creates a landscape which is at once crowded and withdrawn. In sin rumbo, Crespo invites others into the interruption, the pause, the space between cycles. And in this negotiation with momentum, Crespo searches for something beyond/between the comfort of limits and their innate need to be directionless.
“[Crespo’s] voice is lifted, a captivating beacon that pulls us together.”
– Foxy Digitalis
A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing. Watch below or on YouTube.
Isabel Crespo Pardo (they/them) is a NYC-based latinx vocalist, improviser-composer, and interdisciplinary artist. Their work actively entangles music, visual art, text and performance, always evolving to reflect the intra/interpersonal spaces they inhabit. Reveling in soft chaos, they embrace openness and specificity to create poetic work(s).
For Crespo, art is a place to gather, to exercise intuition, rigor and delight. They are deeply invested in building generative structures and intentionally inviting others into focused explorations. Most recently, they released el rostro (des)cubierto, a collection of eight deeply intimate pieces weaving composition and improvisation together to explore self and sociality. The development of this music required embracing the challenge of patiently listening to one another, striving towards interdependence, & reveling in all that it requires. They wrote this music for Afarin Nazarijou (qanun), Skyler Hill (guitar), and SeaJun Kwon (bass).
Crespo’s main compositional vehicle is sinonó, a poemsong trio featuring themself (voice), Lester St. Louis (cello), Henry Fraser (bass). sinonó is a brief submergence, a string of choices, a container for the communion of rigor and failure. The trio has performed together for two years, and will release their debut album, la espalda y su punto radiante in early 2024. In November 2022, Crespo premiered 6., a six-week interdisciplinary installation piece featuring close collaborators Loré Yessuff, Eden Girma, Kwami Winfield, Chris Williams, and Lester St. Louis, at Roulette Intermedium as part of their 2022 Van Lier Fellowship. Making use of screen printing, sculpture and sound, the performance activated contemplation of community and improvisation. In June 2022, they drip, drip, a co-created site-specific piece with edi kwon in the catacombs of the Green-Wood Cemetery. Inspired by this historic space and sharing in each other’s grief and light, the duo crafted a ritual of transformation through improvisation, dance, poetry, and the use of found objects. In May 2022, they premiered desbordándome, an evening-length large-scale embroidered graphic score composed for sinonó. In this piece, they explore themes of change, interconnectedness, and failure, as well as the expressive and sonic potential of words.
Crespo is consistently involved in collaborative projects. Presently, they are a member of tilt (with Kalia Vandever and Carmen Q. Rothwell), tombstar (with edi kwon, Zekkereya El-magharbel, and Lesley Mok), Chatterbox (with Jolee Gordon and Priya Carlberg), and chululu (with Stephani Borgani). They will participate in Anna Abondolo and Jon Starks’ ORDER at HERE Arts Theatre in August 2023. They collaborated as a vocalist-improviser on SECONDARY, a five-channel video installation written and directed by Matthew Barney. This ensemble piece was developed in the collaborative environment of improvisational workshops with movement director David Thomson and composer Jonathan Bepler. The 60-minute piece was on display at Barney’s studio in Spring 2023.
“sin rumbo” was developed as part of Isabel Crespo Pardo’sRoulette 2023 Residency, made possible with funds provided by the Jerome Foundation. This performance is presented through Roulette’s GENERATE program, providing over 30 artists each year with in-depth creative and technical support.
