Kent Olofsson - Composer
Biography
Kent Olofsson (1962) is a composer with an extensive artistic output of over 200 works that span a broad field of genres, ensemble types and contexts including music for orchestra, chamber music, electroacoustic music, music theatre, rock music, music for baroque instruments and works for dance performances and installations. His music has been performed by ensembles and orchestras like Ensemble Recherche, Symphonieorchesters des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Swedish Radio Choir, KammarensembleN, Klangforum Wien, Oslo Sinfonietta and Avantii! and by conductors as Lothar Zagrosek, Gustavo Dudamel, Mario Venzago and Franck Ollu.
The last decade his artistic work and research has been particularly focused on exploring musical composition as dramaturgical strategies in interdisciplinary and intermedial theatre performances. Olofsson holds a PhD in artistic research with the thesis Composing the Performance from 2018. In the thesis he discusses the artistic and collaborative processes in five performances that he created together with Teatr Weimar and that are situated in the intersection between contemporary theatre, new music, radio plays and performance art. The productions with Teatr Weimar have been widely recognized also internationally with performances like Hamlet II: Exit Ghost, A Language at War and Arrival Cities: Hanoi, the latter composed for Vietnamese instruments, chamber ensemble and electronics. Recent works and productions in the field include the highly acclaimed Independence Day and In Search of Lost Time (a staging of Proust’s novel), two intermedial stage works created in collaboration with actor, writer, director, and performance artist Nina Jeppsson. Currently he is working with Jeppsson on a film project, Zonen, that takes it point of departure in the images and films of Tarkovsky.
Other recent projects are Alan, an opera for voice and electroacoustic music about the mathematician and cryptoanalysist Alan Turing; Frozen in Amber which is a dance performance for two dancers and two electric guitar players; and the theatre play Fru Sorg based on a novel by Selma Lagerlöf.
Since 2021 Olofsson is professor in performing arts for the research area Concept and Composition at the Stockholm University of the Arts.
