CoLab 2013 Day 4

This final day of our CoLab project was obviously very different to the others. The Brighton teenagers were all coming down to London for the day for the performance at Laban, but there was no time for much rehearsal or hanging around. We met at Laban and quickly ran through our performance in the Studio Theatre. The atmosphere was particularly different to how it had been previously: whereas before it had been creative, now it was more about perfectionism and fine tuning. Tony was keen for us to adapt quickly to the different space, which some of the dancers but mostly the musicians were not used to. The concept of front and different "spots" around the room was alien to a lot of us musicians and we had a very short amount of time to learn it! We also learnt that we would be doing two performances - one at 1.30pm and the other at 2.00pm in Studio 10.
Before long an audience was filtering in ready for our first performance. It was just as we had done it yesterday and the overall consensus was that it went well. I was not ever so pleased with my improvisation, but I felt it was a one-off and thought I could do better in the next performance.

Performing at Laban

Performing at Laban

Following our first performance, Joe Townsend led a little feedback session where both musicians and dancers were asked what they had learnt from working with each other. All responses were positive and it was clear that these Brighton teenagers had really enjoyed the experience - as had I! 

Feedback

Our second performance was in yet another different space and after a very quick changeover, we were performing again. As a musician I am used to adapting to different spaces in terms of acoustic, but much less in terms of spatial layout! It was actually quite confusing trying to relate the strange layout of Laban Studio 10 back to the dance studio at BHASVIC where we had rehearsed! This is yet another thing I learnt as a result of collaboration with dancers. I feel the second performance was slightly better than the first, at least in terms of my improvisation! My friends Dave and Katie also came along too, which was great of them - in fact, I was a little disappointed more people didn't come, as neither performance had a particularly large audience. Nevertheless, I was pleased with both performances and thought we ended the project on a high. We had a round of thank-yous to all those involved in leading, and we all received cards signed by the teenagers, which was a really nice touch. It was clear they all benefited from the project, and it's a great feeling to know I helped! I also gained a huge amount from the experience, especially the rare opportunity to collaborate on equal terms with dancers. I was thrilled to be part of the whole process and really loved every bit.

CoLab 2013 Day 3

We had left yesterday's session knowing that the piece of music we had devised needed to be changed, but we'd had overnight to think about it and were able to discuss ideas with Tony before today's session began fully. We agreed the main problem is that the bass line is too strong. We had previously agreed the bass line would be one of the riffs in 4/4, but Tony made the point that everyone naturally listens to the bass, and if this is in 4/4 then the whole piece will feel like it's in 4/4 - despite other musicians playing in 3/4, 5/4 and 7/4 over the top. Another issue was simply being too firmly centred in C major. Luckily, we were able to solve both these problems with one solution: rather than having George play a bass riff, he could instead do long held notes with random pitches, on random beats. This would help the piece lose its 4/4 feel and also its strong C major feel. We also agreed that we could take on board the dancers' idea of accumulation, building up not only in dynamic and texture but also in harmonic instability. In practical terms, this meant gradually introducing chromatic notes into your riff until it is entirely different from the riff you started with. With these ideas agreed upon, we felt a lot happier about our piece fitting better with the dance, and felt that implementing them would not be too much of a problem.
When the Brighton teenagers arrived, we did our normal dance warm-ups, although in a slightly shortened form as Tony was aware of time. This was the last session we would have and while we had a number of strong ideas, we had not yet brought them together into one performance. Immediately after warm-ups we broke off into separate music and dance groups, giving the dancers the opportunity to rehearse their group accumulation routine (which they had not been ever so happy with yesterday), and musicians the opportunity to introduce our new ideas for adapting our existing piece. I was pleased with how quickly the group adapted to the changes, and within about an hour's rehearsal space we had vastly improved our piece, implementing the changes previously discussed and also some collective group "silences".
We brought the music and dance groups back together just before lunch and ran through the accumulation routine. Both groups had hugely improved on yesterday and Tony was satisfied with our adapted piece of music. The challenge now was bringing together all the ideas we'd had up until now into a sufficiently long performance. Tony's approach to this was as it had been throughout the whole project: run it and see what happens. He briefly outlined a vague structure: a new dance "exhaustion" exercise the dancers had worked on (unaccompanied), accumultion routines, then into the "duos". As we ran this through I felt quite uncomfortable, feeling that we hadn't been given enough information to know what we were meant to be playing, and when. The dancers, however, seemed happy with this approach. This way of working once again highlighted to me the differences between how dancers and musicians approach rehearsing and working together. While I was happy to try new ways of working, in this instance I just didn't feel anyone really knew what outcome we were working towards as we ran it through. Eventually the first run-through ground to a halt when we finally reached a point of indecision for both musicians and dancers, and we broke off for lunch, giving us Trinity musicians an opportunity to voice our concerns and establish a better understanding of what the final performance would look like. As we spoke with Tony over lunch, he too showed concerns that there was uncertainty amongst the group and we worked together on helping each other understand what we were aiming towards. As the group came together again over lunch we had a much clearer idea of what the final performance would look like and I was much happier during the subsequent run-throughs.

Rehearsing our performance


After running through the material we had so far several times, Tony came to the conclusion that we needed to put together something more, as the performance was only just reaching 10 minutes as it was. Time was especially tight as we were doing an informal "showing" of our work at 4.00pm to parents of the Brighton teenagers. We had half an hour to compile a few more minutes' worth of material and we separated once more, with the task of devising a few more minutes of music. We had about half an hour to do this so the pressure was on, but luckily Sarah took the lead, using one of the ideas we had discussed together in our planning before coming to Brighton: word music. We wrote down a list of words formed from the letters A-G and Sarah explained the concept: every musician must simply play through this list of words in their own time, listening carefully to the others and changing note when you feel it would be harmonically appropriate. Someone pointed out that clarinet, saxophone and horn would have to transpose and suggested quickly writing out the words again in their respective keys, but I felt this was unnecessary for several reasons: this would mean writing the list out in full three more times (in B flat, E flat and F) when we're already pushed for time, and then the words wouldn't be words anyway. (For example, the word "CAGE" transposed into F reads "GEDB" - not a word.) I also felt we should just trust in the abilities of the transposing players - I had heard them play enough to judge that they were both good musicians and reckoned they'd be up for it. We gave this word music an initial run through and were surprised with the result - it sounded amazing! Admittedly we were playing in an extremely echoey sports hall at the time and Fred made the very good point that the acoustic was doing a lot of work for us, helping tone quality and meaning we didn't need to worry about staggered breathing. However despite this we were still pleased with how quickly we'd devised a new bit of musical material and were keen to put it together with the dancers.
As the dancers came in, we had a very hurried run through of this new section together, and then it was time for our first "performance". A few parents had come along to watch so we took the opportunity to test the whole performance in front of an audience, before the main performances tomorrow at Laban. The final structure for our performance was as follows:

Our four pieces which we had composed on day 1 were not included in our final performance plan.
The initial performance went well, with no mistakes and very positive feedback from the small audience. The session ended with a brief round-up and feedback session led by Tony, as there would not be much opportunity for that tomorrow at Laban. After seeing our trial performance go so well, everyone was excited and looking forward to tomorrow's trip to Laban! This marked the end of the actual rehearsing and collaborating part of the project, as tomorrow's trip would be solely performance, and in a way I was sad for it to finish - I had really learnt a lot from the dancers and thoroughly enjoyed working with them.
We were supposed to meet Tony after this session for a little debriefing, but due to a miscommunication we were unable to do so. We made our way back to London ready for tomorrow's performance at Laban.

CoLab 2013 Day 2

Tony had set us a little task to be completed before today's session: to notate, using graphic score, our dance/music duos from yesterday. Musicians therefore had to use graphic scores to depict our improvised compositions, while the dancers had to depict their dance solos. The first part of today's session revolved around this concept of graphic notation. After another short dance warm-up, we split off into our groups of four from yesterday with a new task: using the graphic notations we'd brought along with us, create a unified score which represents both the music and dance using one form of notation. While the scores we'd completed prior to this session represented either music or dance, our challenge now was to combine the two to create a notation that both musicians and dancers can read from.

Examining graphic scores and being set our task

 Not long into this task it became clear that none of the Brighton teenagers had ever used graphic notation before - the dancers in particular. A lot of the dancers had struggled to devise a notation for what they were dancing and had resorted to drawing stick figures of their various dance moves. Part of the challenge was getting them out of this literal depictive mindset and into a more representative mindset that a graphic score requires. Luckily as part of the planning that Sarah and I did prior to this project, I had gone to the Trinity library and borrowed some contemporary music, some of which used graphic scores. I was therefore able to show these to the rest of the group as a guideline of what sort of thing graphic scores usually represented. Jason, one of the dance coaches on the project, also brought along an example of "Labanotation" - a method of notating dance on graphic score. This was helpful not only for the dancers but also for me, as I had never seen dance notation before and found it fascinating.

Graphic score musical notation

Graphic dance notation


With these examples, the group began to get a better idea of what was required, or not required, from a graphic score and quickly began inputting ideas for a unified dance/music notation system. I was happy to use these ideas and only needed to make a few suggestions, such as:

• We musicians agreed our improvisations should be in F. Is this an important feature or are we happy to leave it down to the performer's discretion? How about not specifying which key in particular, but just specifying the two musicians should play in the same key? How would we notate that?
• It's OK to write a few words - written music is a form of graphic notation and that has words too, such as tempo and dynamic markings.
• How do we specify when we want the musician and the dancer to do different things? For example, my improvisation had a moving part while the dancer stayed still - how can we mark the moving part on the score whilst indicating the dancer should stay still?

We spent a good amount of time working on our notation and eventually came up with graphic scores which everyone in the group felt they could read from.

Our group's finished score

 
This exercise was fascinating, something I've never even considered before and I'm sure unified music/dance notation has a lot of potential to be explored further! Each group performed their duos again, like we had at the end of yesterday's session, except this time specifically reading from the scores we'd worked on. The difference in each performance was really quite marked - even though we'd all tried to create scores from our performances, the scores in turn helped shape the subsequent performances! I certainly improvised very differently with the graphic score notation to guide me. Not only did it further increase my awareness of what the dancer was about to do - it was right there on the score! - but seeing it represented visually really changed how I responded to the dancer's movement. This was a truly fascinating experiment and certainly one of the more memorable things I will take away from this project. We all agreed that these scores should be implemented into our final performance.
The second half of this day's session was vastly different. Tony wanted to work with the idea of "accumulation". In dance terms, this meant cycling a routine but adding a "move" each time it looped. Although the original idea was to combine this idea with the duration concept, particularly one minute, it soon became clear that accumulation dances were too "minimalist", in terms of slow building up, to cram into one minute. All the musicians broke off from the main group with the task of composing a piece with a clear pulse yet not definitively in any single time signature. We also experimented with "accumulation". With this brief, we came up with the idea of dividing our group into pairs, with each pair playing in a different time signature to all the other pairs. After a period of ideas and rehearsal, we came back to the dancers with a piece of music with the following characteristics:

• Simultaneous 3/4, 4/4, 5/5 and 7/4 time signature riffs.
• Tonal centre of C.
• Riffs coming in one by one, so the piece gradually becomes more and more complex.

As we played it back with the dancers and observed what they were doing, it became clear that our piece was simply too light-hearted for the dancing they were doing. While it was ambiguous pulse-wise, as requested, it was still very strictly tonal and still felt generally quite strong. We were pleased with the piece, naming it our "ironic groove", but decided it was probably too "listenable" as it was. Tony wanted something more "edgy". Time had run out by this point in the session and we agreed that tomorrow morning we would work on adapting the piece so that it felt more unified with the dance style - giving us something to think about overnight.

CoLab 2013 Day 1

This was the first day of our actual CoLab project. We had to meet in Brighton at 10.30am so I had an early start! The location where our project would be taking place was Brighton, Hove & Sussex Sixth Form College (BHASVIC), which had a purpose-built dance studio suitable for our requirements. Travelling down to Brighton went smoothly and when I arrived I met the other members of our group: the other musicians, Fred and George, and the three dancers from Laban, Alistair, Sara and Zoe. We were also introduced to members of staff from Brighton & Hove Music & Arts, the organisation with which we were jointly running the project. Not only was this project a collaboration between musicians and dancers, but also a collaboration between two separate organisations working together!
The teenagers who we were to be working with arrived at 11.00am. There were roughly 10 dancers and 6 musicians. After an icebreaker "game" organised by Joe Townsend (who was in Brighton with us for the first morning of our project), we all began doing basic dance warm-ups led by Tony Thatcher. Every morning of our project began in the same way, with dance warm-ups for dancers and musicians. This meant that musicians who perhaps had not danced before (I certainly had not done) were able to experience, in a basic way, what it is like to be part of a dance group. This experience proved useful for later on in the project. Unfortunately one member of the group fainted during these warm-ups on the first day. We were all shocked by this, as it happened so suddenly. Thankfully he was alright (after a hospital visit he returned the next day, eager not to be missing out!) and the shared experience of shock actually probably aided group bonding somewhat.
After warm-ups, Tony introduced to us one of the ideas he was keen to explore throughout the project: the concept of duration. In particular, one minute. He was keen for both dancers and musicians to get a sense of how a minute "feels" - without looking at a clock or having someone count out seconds for you! 

Explaining the duration concept

Once this had been explained, dancers and musicians split into separate groups: dancers stayed in the studio and worked on minute-long solo dances, while musicians moved downstairs into a separate room with the task of working on four minute-long pieces of music. While Sarah and I had quite extensively planned what we might do should we be left in charge of leading music sessions, we actually found that our task was clear in this instance, and our plans were not required. However, some of the concepts we had discussed did come in useful. We had an ensemble of four flutes, one saxophone, one clarinet, one horn, one double bass and one djembe. With this non-conventional ensemble we agreed that all of our pieces should be non-notated and learnt by ear. To begin with, the group dynamic was very much "leaders" (the four Trinity students) and "students" (the others), but as the session went on the Brighton musicians gained confidence to make suggestions and even challenge some of our ideas. By the end of the session we had together devised four minute-long part-improvised pieces in contrasting styles:

• One atmospheric "long note" piece with a tonal centre of G.
• One groove-based jazz piece.
• One atonal depictive work based on the idea of "cityscape".
• One "wildcard" where we all improvised over a bass riff.

I was pleased with the progress made in the group and when we joined the dancers again we were able to play our pieces with the solo dances they had been working on. The results were particularly interesting: for us, it was interesting to see how we perceived our music differently when they were dancing along, and for the dancers they were able to respond and adapt their dances to the mood of the music.
The next stage in the project was a sort of role reversal: while previously the dancers had adapted and partly-improvised their dances to match the music, this time the musicians were given the opportunity to improvise along with the dancers. Each musician was matched with a dancer to make a pair, which was then joined up with another pair so that each group had two dancers and two musicians. The idea behind this exercise was for the musicians to play along and improvise/compose music which reflects each dancer's solo. To enable us to familiarise ourselves with the dance we "shadowed" the dancers - actually following their steps and attempting to copy closely their every move in the one-minute dance. This was a particular challenge for me! I had never danced before and suddenly I had been thrown in at the deep end. While this exercise helped me understand the dance I would be writing music for, I felt a little embarrassed dancing in front of these people I didn't know very well! Once I had become familiar enough with the dance, I began to improvise along on my horn as my partner, Sophia, danced. As we were in groups made up of two pairs, the dancers would dance their solos together, thus forming a "duo". Equally, the musicians would be playing along together. Part of the challenge, therefore, was to improvise music which not only matched what our respective dancers were doing, but which also fit with the other musician's improvisation. To help ourselves, we agreed that we would use the tonal centre of F major and agree certain parts of our compositions which complimented each other - for example, one of us holding a note while the other improvised a melody. The whole group dynamic as we performed was fascinating and something I've never experienced before: responding to another improvising musician while also trying to closely match a dancer's movement is an amazing experience!
As the day drew to a close we shared what we had been working on in our "duos" groups and ended with a brief feedback session. We still didn't really understand what our final performance on Thursday would involve, but I began to realise that actually, nor did Tony! The idea was to work together, not just those of us who were "leading" but every person in the group, just to explore new areas and see where it took us! This working method is fascinating and also a little scary at times! It's so different to what I'm used to as a classical musician, though, and after this first day of the project I was feeling excited at the prospect of exploring further this working idea.
We were staying in a B&B in Portslade, a few miles and a bus ride away from BHASVIC. It was a little tricky to get to and I would have preferred something a bit closer, but the shared experience of working out how to get there helped us bond as a group and we spent the evening hanging out and getting to know each other better. This certainly helped us work better together in the next few days.

CoLab 2013: Preparation

In order to allocate us to suitable CoLab projects this year, the team had sent round a list of the proposed projects back in November. We were asked to fill in a survey and indicate our preferences for which project we'd like to be involved in. The one which stood out most for me was "Brighton and Hove Arts Residency", because I enjoy teaching and was keen to develop my skills in this area, but also because I would have the opportunity to work with dancers; something I'd not done before. The prospect of a trip to Brighton was also exciting!

I was thrilled to find out in January that I'd been allocated to this project and looked forward to finding out more about what it involved. Sarah, one of the other musicians in the project, and I arranged a meeting with Tony Thatcher in the week prior to departure to establish more about the project itself, but also the logistics of getting to and from Brighton and accomodation arrangements. From this meeting we realised that this would not be like other projects musicians are used to: Tony was very open to our ideas and suggestions and trusted to us to negotiate the music side of the project. The collaboration element was apparent from the beginning and rather than having a pre-formed idea of what the outcome of the project would be, Tony was happy to see how it took shape as it went along, combining input and ideas from everyone involved. As a classical musician I am used to mostly being told what to do by a conductor who already has a firm idea of what the outcome of a project will be, so this new approach to working together really opened my eyes.
Sarah and I met together the next day to discuss musical ideas and how we would work with the musicians. As we were still unsure about how the project would unfold, it was hard to pinpoint specific ideas, as we didn't know what to expect. To combat this we devised several ideas, using various easily-adaptable techniques such as improvised and aleatoric music.

Our original proposed ideas.

Once we had our ideas written up, we felt that we had done all the preparation we could given the information available to us, so agreed to just wait and see how the project unfolded!