‘nine verses’ – Live performance with Ruby Allen

August 4, 2025 11:03 am

Sunday 24th August – 7.30pm

nine verses is a new live sound performance work by ruby allen {nella} {bury} created as part of Market Gallery’s Live Art Commission. 

An encounter between voice and pianoharp, the work is a durational performance across 63 minutes {9 x 7} experienced lying down.  Drawing on forms of lament the work unfurls sound in the space through a series of time based vocal gestures. Between two voices/two bodies/two resonant chambers a call and response unfolds, capturing, hurtling, ushering something between them. One voice begins in the belly, through toes, drawing breath; the other in heart/strings, innards, bones of a pianoharp. 

What does it mean to suspend a voice in an object, and in turn create a new voice fused with resonance. What is thrown back and forth and held in between? The harp is a microphone, it is also a vocalist.

The performance will take place in the Market Gallery space (13 Ross Street) which has level access and an accessible toilet. The performance will last for 63 minutes with time before and after for landing/grounding with tea. 7:30pm doors for 7:57pm start (the event will finish at 9:30). This event is free but booking is required due to capacity. Book tickets via eventbrite. The work is created for the floor and the audience will be lying down – we will have seated options available if this is not accessible to you. 

If you have any access requirements, including questions about sensory concerns or severe allergens, please get in touch on market@marketgallery.org

We have travel bursaries available to support comfortable and safe attendance, please email us to request one. 

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ruby allen {nella} {bury}, is an artist, vocalist and audio maker whose work is influenced by the yelps, textures and rhythms of punk, folk, dub and other forms of protest song.

Ruby Allen kneeling on the floor in front of the piano harp with a microphone stand next to her. She is sitting behind a veil of blue gauze that is light up in pink and purple colours
A close up of Ruby Allen positioned a tuner in the piano harp. She is sitting behind a veil of blue gauze that is light up in pink and purple colours
A close up on Ruby's hand with long red nails striking the piano hard chords. The image is tainted by low atmospheric purple/pink light
All photographs by Erika Stevenson

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The following is a text written by committee member Marguerite Carson:

The force behind the movement of time is a mourning. 

The voice fades in the ear even as meaning is articulated. 

As air moves over the vocal chords.

As sound moves into the harp.

1

Writing about sound is like trying to hold water, your cupped hands fill up but only a trickle remains, a trace of the fleeting body that flowed into the crevices and crinkles of your palms momentarily. Like water sound can be held in reservoirs, in collected bodies that hum with a largeness we can’t comprehend, it wets edges and porosities, absorbed into the soil, the sand or lapping hard against the slick concrete. 

2

Sound is always moving, there is no still sound, but that is not to say there is not stillness to be found in sound. The stillness that might be just a ripple, where we find the breath and the noises of the body allowed to creep in. 

3

Left in silence the harp still sings, it builds its own momentum, and attests to the sound that is moving always. Like a tuning fork it hums its own note, takes in sound, gargles, and swallows it for us, into growing resonance that builds and builds. 

4

All sound exists in delay, everything is an echo, a reply. In the space between an acoustic event and its hearing we find this suspension, between our throats and our ears, our ears and the space. 

5

Listening is moulded by the space a sound is placed within; hearing its breadth, capacity, fullness, its range. Bodies absorb sound taking it inward. As listeners we change the sound, soaking it up from the space, and it moves through us; in this sense we are all participants, caught in the eternal feedback loop of resonance circling again and again through the room, through the bones and skin, the surfaces and densities they provide. 

6

renvoi; following Jean Luc Nancy we might understand this resonance as a return, a chain of referencing reaching simultaneously backwards and forwards, a call and response, of a presence to something other than itself, or to an absence of thing, the referral of a here to an elsewhere.

7

gathering makes a grammar all its own

8

A direction from here to elsewhere; facing the different directions consecutively. In removing the internal organs from an instrument the sound is freed from its allotted path. Felt, rather than played, the now naked strings are open as a heart, as a throat, unafraid.

9

The cradle of delay becomes a kind of veil, the layered strings catch you as you fall, you are never met with silence. In your stillness your body is moved by the reverberation of sound created by this space with you in it, a keening cry rising above everything. The sound touches you, in your eyes and ears, in your heart and belly, and the hairs on your skin stand on end.