Dancers

Dancers

As stated in my project description:

– Look at the possibilities for at external sources, such as the audience, a net stream, dancers, humidity, lights etc. can control the development in the music and in the video trough out a performance by using alternative sensors, controllers and programs.

I want to look into collaboration with dancers. The last month I’ve invited professional dancers Hedvig Bang and Anette Boge to collaborate with me.

One of the main things I discovered was that improvising with dancers is not so different from improvising with musicians: we can choose to follow each other or we can choose to do something completely different that might inspire the others. We can also decide upon to what extent composition should be a part of the performance.

This collaboration also presents an embodiment of the energy in my music, this I can say, with out a doubt, is very interesting, since I easily can see if the dancers interpret my music as I intended it.

I’ve made a temporary holding point for my self: if the musics intentions are not clear enough for the dancer to interpret it as I intended it, it’s not good enough.

Regarding the musical aspect, lately I’ve been very influenced by Amon Tobin and as some of you might hear in the following recording I’m mainly just playing around with the sounds from Tobin’s song Big Furry Head.

Here you can see and hear rehearsal 1 & 2, both 15 minutes. The dancer is Anette Boge. Both video and sound is recorded with my phone, so the resolution on both is quite bad, but I want to emphasize that this is just to show the earliest stage with a collaboration with a dancer.

After this we sat down and watched the recording and processed it mentally.

Musically I liked the progression of the piece and it’s beginning, but when it hits it’s peak I don’t feel I manage to keep it there. I’ll need some more practice with these sounds.

We spoke about making the beginning a stronger statement.

We both agreed that we liked the interaction on 5:07 and would try to develop this further the next time.

Apart from this, there were some minor ideas and adjustments, then we did it again:

This time I played a little louder, so on the recording you actually can hear what I’m doing.

As previously discussed, we took our time at the beginning. I really enjoyed that and I think an audience would to, this because you get time to empty your mind and get ready to perceive or perform a performance.

As you can see at 3:42 and on, we develop what we talked about regarding 5:07 in the previous video.

Musically I felt this time went better than the last one, but I still need to play more with those sounds to make it sound more convincing.

The development we had at the beginning and at 3:42 resulted in that those two parts came almost immediately after each other and constructed a framework for how we want to start the piece. So from recording and evaluating, the peace slowly takes form. How strict we’ll want to be regarding the form, only time can tell.

Thanks to Anette Boge and Hedvig Bang for showing interest in collaborating with me. And thanks to Anders Tveit and Erik Strutz for introducing me to Amon Tobin’s music.

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