Lawson White is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and performer whose experience includes contemporary opera, theatrical music performance, and an onscreen role in an independent feature film.
As a former member of Sō Percussion, Lawson developed an approach to performance in which sound is inseparable from gesture, movement, staging, character, and visual presence. His subsequent work in film brought together acting, score collaboration, music supervision, production, engineering, and instrumental performance within a single project.
These experiences continue to inform the work he creates today. Lawson is particularly interested in performances where musicians are not hidden from view, but become part of a work’s theatrical and visual language—and in appearing onstage in interdisciplinary pieces that he composes, co-creates, or develops in collaboration with choreographers, directors, filmmakers, and visual artists.
Performance for Stage & Screen
Feynman
Press & Documentation: Real Time Opera · Jack Vees · The New York Times Review · New York Times Feature · Yale Alumni Magazine
Chamber opera by Jack Vees and Paul SchickReal Time Opera / Norfolk Chamber Music Festival / The Knitting Factory · 2005
Role: Percussionist with Sō Percussion
Inspired by the life and ideas of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, Jack Vees’s chamber opera Feynman was written for a solo baritone accompanied by percussion quartet.
Lawson performed the opera as a member of Sō Percussion at its June 2005 premiere at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival and in its subsequent New York production at the Knitting Factory. The production combined live percussion, theatrical staging, lighting, and live and prerecorded video in an unconventional musical portrait of Feynman’s personality, scientific imagination, and intellectual restlessness.
Quotes:
“The performances, especially that of the crack ensemble Sō Percussion … were game and compelling.”—James R. Oestreich, The New York Times
(Untitled)
Press & Documentation: Cantaloupe Music — soundtrack | David Lang — score page | AllMusic — Lawson White credits | The New York Times — review | Los Angeles Times — review | Roger Ebert — review | Variety — review | IONCINEMA — Jonathan Parker interview
(Additional Music · Score Realization & Soundtrack Production with David Lang · Engineer, Mixer & Mastering Engineer · Performer: Guitar, Keyboards, Percussion & Programming · On-Screen Role: “Seth”
Feature film directed by Jonathan Parker · Samuel Goldwyn Films · 2009
Jonathan Parker's feature film (Untitled) is a satire of the contemporary art world centered on an uncompromising experimental composer, played by Adam Goldberg. The project required music that could function simultaneously as the fictional composer's own work, as live performance within the story, and as a dramatic score shaping the audience's experience of his world.
Lawson worked closely with David Lang to realize the film's musical language — performing, recording, programming, editing, producing, mixing, and contributing additional music — and appears throughout the film as Seth, one of the musicians in the composer's ensemble. The performances themselves, on camera and on the soundtrack, are largely Lawson's own. With Lang unable to be on set, the score's day-to-day realization ran through him; as Parker put it in a 2009 IONCINEMA interview, “he did the whole score basically.”
The soundtrack — combining music composed for the film with works from Lang's catalog — was produced and edited by Lawson with Lang, and released by Cantaloupe Music.
“ultimately on the side of experimental music and art” — Stephen Holden, The New York Times
“The percussionist (Lawson White) crumples paper.” — Michael O'Sullivan, The Washington Post
“exquisite, judiciously used soundtrack score” — Robert Koehler, Variety
Eliot Feld / Ballet Tech — A Stair Dance
Press & Documentation: Eliot Feld archive · Ballet Tech repertory · New York City Ballet repertory · Dance Informa press roundup · Wall Street Journal review
Solo Marimba
Ballet Tech / MANDANCE PROJECT · The Joyce Theater, New York · premiered October 21, 2004
For Eliot Feld’s A Stair Dance, Lawson performed the solo marimba part of Steve Reich’s Tokyo/Vermont Counterpoint live while five dancers moved through a rising architecture of stairs. Dedicated to tap legend Gregory Hines, the work combines the interlocking pulse of Reich’s counterpoint with athletic precision, wit, and a distinctly physical relationship between rhythm and choreography.
The ballet premiered with Ballet Tech’s MANDANCE PROJECT at The Joyce Theater in 2004 and returned across multiple seasons. It entered New York City Ballet’s repertory in 2006 and has since been staged by additional companies and student ensembles.
Quotes:
“dazzling … a must-see”
— Anna Kisselgoff, The New York Times, quoted by Dance Informa
“The entire cast displayed both remarkable concentration and playfulness.”
— Robert Greskovic, The Wall Street Journal
“Displaying great athleticism, the dancers run up and down the platforms…”
— New York City Ballet, repertory notes
An embodied approach to interdisciplinary work
For Lawson, performance is not separate from composition. The physical act of producing sound—how a performer moves, occupies a space, interacts with an object, or responds to another body—can become part of the meaning of a work.
His background as an onstage percussionist and onscreen performer gives him a practical understanding of theatrical timing, visual rhythm, physical gesture, ensemble interaction, and the relationship between performers and an audience. It also allows him to approach interdisciplinary projects from inside the performance rather than treating music as something added after the theatrical structure has already been established.
Lawson is especially interested in creating and performing within new works that combine:
Live music and electronics
Dance and physical movement
Film and projected image
Spoken or sung text
Improvisation and structured composition
Theatrical staging
Installation and spatial sound
Musicians functioning as visible performers
Current Work
Lawson’s current work returns to the stage and screen from the composer’s chair: live and studio-based music made in dialogue with movement—voice, pedal steel, synthesizers, percussion, chamber instruments, and electronics shaped through composition and real-time improvisation.
He is developing interdisciplinary work for theaters, galleries, museums, film, and installation. He welcomes conversations with choreographers, dancers, companies, filmmakers, curators, and presenters about commissions, live performance, and collaboration.
He is particularly interested in projects in which he can compose or co-create the music while also performing as part of the work—whether as an instrumentalist, vocalist, electronic musician, actor, or visible presence within the production.
Commission or collaborate: lawson@lawsonwhite.com