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.