KEPT
Matt Scanlon fuses rhythm, story, and silence to explore doubleness—how memory and resilience shape what endures.
Notes on Ritual
My work begins where rhythm and memory meet. In KEPT, the body and the voice share the same breath — words and rhythm overlapping, interrupting, returning. It’s not percussion theatre; it’s a conversation between sound and story, between what’s remembered and what remains unsaid.
In KEPT, I turn that vocabulary inward.
The piece is a rhythm-infused performance memoir — part elegy, part act of resilience.
It asks what remains when the body has been both instrument and witness.
Where STOMP sought collective pulse, KEPT listens for private resonance — the sound that doubleness makes when it finally becomes breath.
Each object in the work — a steel tank, a steel mattress, a vessel that resembles a coffin — becomes both instrument and witness. Through gesture, vibration, and pause, I treat sound as evidence: the residue of contact, the proof that something was once held and released.
Text has entered my practice — fragments, monologues, whispered reckonings.
These voices rise between beats, not as exposition but as interruption.
They carry the unsounded parts of rhythm: the things that can’t be struck, only said.
What interests me now is not perfection but presence.
Each performance begins as an act of attention — to what is found outside and felt again within.
The work refuses abstraction; it stays close to the weight of what endures.
My inquiry lives at the crossing of theatre, installation, and ritual studies.
I’m drawn to the mechanics of endurance — how sound can hold grief, how silence can hold grace, how the body carries both.
About Matt Scanlon
Matt Scanlon is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, and composer whose work explores rhythm, memory, and the body as an instrument of endurance. A veteran performer, music director, and workshop artist within the STOMP lineage, Scanlon helped develop new material for the show and its extended creative ecosystem — most notably Pandemonium: The Lost and Found Orchestra, where he contributed during its formative workshops and performed internationally at the Sydney Opera House, the Royal Festival Hall, and Amsterdam’s Carré Theatre.
As a jazz drummer, Scanlon has led his own quartet, performing across the U.S. and Europe. His improvisational approach — part percussive precision, part emotional architecture — shapes his current performance language, which merges musical structure with theatrical inquiry.
His latest work, KEPT, is a rhythm-infused performance memoir that blends percussive ritual, spoken narrative, and silence. Developed through BN1 Arts Centre’s Artist Development Scheme, the piece investigates how sound and the body can hold grief and how performance becomes an act of release.
Scanlon studied at Columbia University and pursued graduate work in philosophy and theology at Princeton Theological Seminary before turning toward performance as a form of lived research. His practice now moves between theatre, music, and installation — grounded in rhythm, resilience, and the poetics of endurance.