Harmony needs more than one - Lillian Ross-Millard, Anne White, Miranda Jones
Residency 7 to 12 April 2026
A period of development for a collective made up of Lillian Ross-Millard, Anne White, Miranda Jones:
'Harmony needs more than one (hereafter Harmony for short) is an innovative installation /durational performance work which blends painting, live singing, installation and participation with an aesthetic of error, uncertainty and negotiation, where every element is in evolving conversation.
We want to complicate harmony’s usage in Western philosophy and music, where the word often emphasizes synthesis or unity. Instead, we’re excited by the radical multiplicity that is required for harmony to happen — harmony needs more than one.
Harmony is being developed by a collective made up of Lillian Ross-Millard (Glasgow, UK), Miranda Jones (Montreal/ Tiohtià:ke, QC), and Anne White (Paris, FR). We’ve conducted 4 initial weeks of development on Harmony with Studio 303 and La Serre (Montreal/ Tiohtià:ke, 2023-25). We are thrilled to be conducting our first Scottish-based period of development at Tramway this April.
If you want to read more about what we’re up to… read on!
In 2025, we presented a durational structure to a small invited audience during which we performed overlapping activities, inviting ambient attention and split focus. The audience was free to come and go. They could join in activities, or observe. We offered simple food to encourage an organic, embodied engagement.
Performance activities included a reading aloud game, where we mashed together texts related to our harmony research. Excerpts of these texts were available on computer screens for audiences to read at any time. We also shared collective movement sequences and live development of visual art. We shared an anti-performative approach to live singing, signalling to audiences that we were rehearsing a polyphonic piece or practicing intervals. These activities proposed an aesthetics of error, uncertainty and negotiation, where every element was in evolving conversation with other elements. The result was a hybrid space – heightened like a gallery and relaxed like a gathering place to chat, eat, ask questions, sound, move, read, reflect.
During the upcoming residency, we’ll build on the above-described structure to:
• research how blending of figurative and abstract painting can create a visual organisation for the space and provide a visual guide for activities or modes of engagement
• Clarify from a dramaturgical and access perspective how audience participation informs aesthetic, practical and access questions
• clarify our positionality as white middle-class artists, making this subjectivity clear so that harmony isn’t proposed as a universal idea, but a set of decisions by three particular artists with lots of room for audiences from diverse backgrounds to influence what we propose.