Benjamin Portzen [he / him] (b.1998) is a composer, improviser, and movement artist who strives to make space for connection, healing, presence, and absence through immersive sound and movement works. By enabling performers and witnesses to be with time differently – often through alinear, cartographically-constructed scores – Ben offers the opportunity to create and interrogate relationships between bodies, ideas, sounds, and objects across, around, and through time. At present, Ben’s research interests include designing intelligent computer collaborators for composition and improvisation, illuminating the body as the locus of creative potential in the creation of sound works, the facilitation of “real” experiences for performers and audiences, and the ways in which artistic practice offers the opportunity for radical self-transformation and -dissolution.
Ben sees little boundary between artistic and religious practices, freely embracing the ritualism of repetition, and improvisation’s ability to put us in contact with the unknown by grounding oneself completely in the present. At this intersection, Ben explores the liminal space between creativity and destructivity in a process he has found to continually reveal fascinating ways in which art can help us live with greater depth, beauty, and grace.
Ben holds a Bachelor’s of Music from Lawrence University (‘21) where he studied composition with Asha Srinivasan and Joanne Metcalf, piano with Anthony Padilla, improvisation with Matt Turner, and dance with Margaret Paek. As a 2021 Thomas J. Watson Fellow, Ben spent one year across Europe and Canada exploring the role art can play in imagining and building a more equitable, sustainable, and compassionate future by embracing our unknowns with more fascination than fear.
portzen_short_bio.pdf, portzen_long_bio.pdf
portzen_headshot_portrait.jpg, portzen_headshot_landscape.jpg
Gratitude [inspired by Jasmine Hearn]: I am here today in this body/mind/heart not by miracle, but by the support, guidance, love, and nourishment of innumerable people, places, beings, sounds, and bodies. What follows is an ever-evolving and ever-incomplete list of those to which I want to express my profound gratitude.
Ora Itkin
each breath
The Saint Paul Conservatory of Music
David Fritze
Thomas
the sound of frogs
Asha Srinivasan
Brent Peterson
Field Avenue
Molly Reese
Nancy Stark Smith
Deer Park Monastery
Megumi Masaki
my blood and non-blood ancestors
this body
Nolan Ehlers
David Zambrano
Lisa Morley
Brian Portzen
Margaret Paek
the land
Rena Kraut
Thích Nhất Hạnh
Meli
Karen Evanoff
John Supko
Joanne Metcalf
the smell of lilac bushes
Kate Bittner
Brian Pertl
Jasmine Hearn
Pema Chödrön
Julyen Hamilton
Zoe Markle
[…]