Josh Spear

Josh Spear is a composer-performer and artistic researcher. He is interested in how music might provide its own logic alongside a live performance work or be integrated into the action such that a new sonic dramaturgy could arise. Lipsync, mime, Drag and Butoh continue to provide accesses for Josh to combine movement and sound. Josh tends toward a strong visual language that embraces the materiality of objects and scenography and draws influence from physical theatre as a method of storytelling. He sometimes chooses to omit real-life objects so that only their sounds remain, demanding a level of imagination from the audience. Counterpoint is a fundamental principle that applies to the theatrical, visual and musical aspects of his pieces. He is interested in presenting different forms of performance as music, increasingly favouring outside or site-specific options.

Josh is proud to be a member of the composer-performer group Bastard Assignments, with whom he has worked since 2014. Bastard Assignments are a commissioning group working in experimental music and performance who also present their own collaboratively made repertoire. Spear’s work with the group Quartet has also been performed by Ensemble Garage and Decoder Ensemble in Hamburg, Bucharest and Rochester, NY.

In 2022, Josh completed his doctoral fellowship at Norwegian Academy of Music with his thesis, Composing Together and Not Together: Intimacy as a Condition for Collaboration, supervised by Trond Reinholdtsen, Dickie Beau and Eivind Buene. He has spent recent years developing a collaborative compositional practice whereby he tries to elevate performers beyond the role of interpreter by activating their creativity. His 2019 piece FEED was created this way with Bastard Assignments, who have performed this work in London, Manchester and at festivals including SPOR, Music Current Dublin, Aldeburgh Festival and Konsertserien Periferien.

Josh read Music at the University of Manchester, then studied composition for his MMus at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, where he was taught by Edward Jessen and Deirdre Gribbin. He is a Trinity College London Scholar, a grateful recipient of a Jerwood Perorming Arts Micro Bursary, and a winner of a Scotsman Fringe First Award in 2019 for Subject Matter with long-term collaborator Oliver Dawe.

thejoshspear.com
bastardassignments.com

Photograph by Frederick Goff. Styling/art direction by Harry Evans and Robert George Sanders.