I very much enjoyed working with the musicians and other dancers involved in the project and you only have to watch the result to understand why!
Here are some of the photos taken of the performance: From image to movement to image...
Wednesday 12 March 2014
Friday: It'll be alright on the night!
Thanks to good planning and time management we all felt more than ready for the performance on Friday. We spent the time perfecting the linking of the piece and perfecting any moments that were not quite as convincing as they could be.
I very much enjoyed working with the musicians and other dancers involved in the project and you only have to watch the result to understand why!
I very much enjoyed working with the musicians and other dancers involved in the project and you only have to watch the result to understand why!
Thursday: Polishing up
We received some lovely excerpts from the dance department on Tuesday evening. Watch and learn:
But, of course, we can't use them all! This one made the cut:
The basic structure of the piece was finalised on Wednesday so Thursday was used for polishing it up. We started to use some of the live photos taken by the photographer on Wednesday to enhance the piece:
...and others of this ilk. See the facebook page for more! (Look at Monday's blog)
Tuesday: Sectionals!!!!
If anyone has ever sat in a room not having a specific brief and not knowing what to expect and then trying to write dome music for the occasion whilst working with electronics, they will understand that it by 11am on Tuesday morning I thought the day would never end. However, its true what they say about breaking the seal, though I doubt that metaphor is particularly appropriate, as after we forced out a couple of half-hearted ideas we were well on our way and actually starting to have healthy debates about the music.
Although we did decide to break for lunch shortly after we got to the point of debating the definition of a 'drone', more to ensure that we maintained our sanity rather than anything else, we had already come up with the building blocks of our first two musical ideas: The overgrown corridor and 'time'.
In the afternoon we touched base with the dancers and then extended our repertoire to include:
Sure, they need a bit more work, but enjoy!
Monday: In the beginning...
Monday was my first experience of the 'Moving Images' project, save for a few emails, as I hadn't been able to attend the meeting. It seemed like an interesting concept; take an image, make it into movement and then turn it back into an image, but I had no understanding beyond this idea - and no idea how I would be involved as a musician...
Monday morning was spent created collages of inspiring pictures. As I looked around I could immediately see stark comparisons and contrasts in everybody's choices and interestingly each collage had a theme or a colour palette running through it. I guess that makes sense on second thoughts - seeing as we were instructed to pick things we liked.
So for the beginning, at least, I still felt shrouded in mystery - not a bad way to start a project at all! And was looking forward to see what would happen next.
Once everybody had finished their individual collages, we all put them up on the wall (something we were swiftly reprimanded for - apparently thats not allowed in Laban..) and then took them down again. So we had our makeshift 'gallery', if you like and as we all like to think, and proceeded to wonder around umming and aahhhing over the recurring themes and stories that the photographs illustrated.
We were then given some background about the pictures by each member of the group, who explained why they had chosen them (to which many of the answers were "I dunno, I just really like it"and who's to question the validity of such a statement? We're not critics) and then promptly broke for lunch.
After the disappointing discovery that the only place located limping distance (serves me right for falling down the stairs, I guess) from Laban can't even bake a jacket potato we headed back to the studio for some in depth discussion. The next task was to choose a selection of the photos that we had collated individually to form a 'group collage', consisting of the images we would then base our piece on. Hours on engaging and energising conversation then ensued, which is interesting seeing as most of us had probably previously had little or no interest in photography, beyond that of dutifully wondering round the upper floors of the Tate every year or so and, let's face it, we're all more comfortable just playing over rhythm changes.
The conversation spanned religion, nature, humanity, light, dark, escapism, freedom.... the list goes on. But eventually we all managed to tie the majority of the pictures to the theme 'NATURE', whether it meant some forest untouched by people to nature's war with humanity to human nature... The point is everyone was happy.
We then went on to debate how to structure the piece. I won't bore you with the details, but we settled on the idea of choosing a handful of pictures to use in order to focus our creative energy. Further debate was had on which pictures to use, but again, it didn't really matter. Every member's input was considered and thoughtful and any would have done.
These made the cut:
There were a few others too but for some reason Blogger won't let me upload them! Go here if you want to see.....
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1418554138383398/
Monday morning was spent created collages of inspiring pictures. As I looked around I could immediately see stark comparisons and contrasts in everybody's choices and interestingly each collage had a theme or a colour palette running through it. I guess that makes sense on second thoughts - seeing as we were instructed to pick things we liked.
So for the beginning, at least, I still felt shrouded in mystery - not a bad way to start a project at all! And was looking forward to see what would happen next.
Once everybody had finished their individual collages, we all put them up on the wall (something we were swiftly reprimanded for - apparently thats not allowed in Laban..) and then took them down again. So we had our makeshift 'gallery', if you like and as we all like to think, and proceeded to wonder around umming and aahhhing over the recurring themes and stories that the photographs illustrated.
We were then given some background about the pictures by each member of the group, who explained why they had chosen them (to which many of the answers were "I dunno, I just really like it"and who's to question the validity of such a statement? We're not critics) and then promptly broke for lunch.
After the disappointing discovery that the only place located limping distance (serves me right for falling down the stairs, I guess) from Laban can't even bake a jacket potato we headed back to the studio for some in depth discussion. The next task was to choose a selection of the photos that we had collated individually to form a 'group collage', consisting of the images we would then base our piece on. Hours on engaging and energising conversation then ensued, which is interesting seeing as most of us had probably previously had little or no interest in photography, beyond that of dutifully wondering round the upper floors of the Tate every year or so and, let's face it, we're all more comfortable just playing over rhythm changes.
The conversation spanned religion, nature, humanity, light, dark, escapism, freedom.... the list goes on. But eventually we all managed to tie the majority of the pictures to the theme 'NATURE', whether it meant some forest untouched by people to nature's war with humanity to human nature... The point is everyone was happy.
We then went on to debate how to structure the piece. I won't bore you with the details, but we settled on the idea of choosing a handful of pictures to use in order to focus our creative energy. Further debate was had on which pictures to use, but again, it didn't really matter. Every member's input was considered and thoughtful and any would have done.
These made the cut:
Atomic bomb: Destruction of nature!
Overgrown corridor - nature fights back!
Stairway - to heaven?
The passage of time - tick tock!
There were a few others too but for some reason Blogger won't let me upload them! Go here if you want to see.....
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1418554138383398/
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