We had a really rich and enjoyable experience with the LCDS-Guildhall collaborations. I recorded this post-collab discussion for our colleagues who couldn't join us that day. They've given permission for me to reproduce it here!
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LCDS-Guildhall Music Collaborations 2014 Post-Collaboration Discussion, 8 December 2014 at The Place
Lauren:
What were some things that you learned or found particularly challenging or interesting
about this project? How did you cope with the short time period?
Sze: I had very different but productive experiences
working with James and Sylvia. With Sylvia we agreed on a great deal of things
but the difficulty was that we didn’t have our musician until very late in the
process. I was choreographing
without knowing what the music would sound like and she was writing without
knowing what it would sound like either.
But she was really present.
Every rehearsal she was there with us, and I realized that she has a
great visual sense as well.
With James it was interesting because we
disagreed so much! We realized
that we have very different approaches and aesthetics. It took us about three meetings to
settle what concept we wanted to work on. But we had many moments where we
realized that it wasn’t working and we had to return to the concepts. The most interesting discussion we had
was when we decided we had to return to understanding each others’ aesthetic
and what we wanted to get out of the piece. In the end we got something very different from what each of
us would otherwise make, and it was very interesting.
James: I used the analogy of raisins and
mustard from Harrison Birtwistle: “Making a piece is like creating a new
recipe. You first go and pick
ingredients. Maybe it’s mustard
and raisins. What matters is the way you put them together, without making the
dish too wishy-washy.”
The nature of our working process was up and down, one week might be great
and the next one dodgy. We hit some brick walls rather than full steam
ahead. Our job was to make it work, not to settle for compromises. We were really interested in trying
each other’s “shoes” on, that is trying out each other’s working process. We
found ways to gel through talking, improvisation and listening to each other to
find a connection.
What didn't work was
when we veered away from collaboration – when we built structures and I had a
written score. We ended up not listening to each other when we had it written
down.
Working with a collaborator with a
different aesthetic forced me to return the concept much more often, which is
something I don’t always do when writing music. This is something useful I will definitely take away with
me.
Chris: I wrote something different from
what I usually write. What helped me and Connor was that we were very clear on
the intentions of the material and we drew the trajectory of the piece before
making it. That helped me to write something that was different and stick to
it.
I also learned that if
something is already not working in the music, putting it together with the
dance makes the issue even more obvious.
Lauren: Looking back to the workshop week that
started these collaborations, this process was in some ways about knowing what tools and decisions
to work with - about experiencing a wide range of tools or ways of working and
then deciding which ones to select.
Yanaelle: It was great
to be working on the project like this, to see how Guildhall people work.
Chris: One thing that
could have been better was if the musicians could have been more present
earlier in the rehearsal process, to really merge the performance with the
dancers and create a stronger connection between them. The dialogue between
music and dance was an ongoing process, which emerged from the live
performance.
Yanaelle: For us,
working with recordings could be tricky. We worked for some time with a
recording of the first section from Thomas. But when the actual musicans came to play for rehearsal it
was very different and it really threw the dancers off because it wasn’t played
the exact same way.
Lauren:
How was it for the composers working with composition tutors who didn’t see the
dance component of the project? When teachers gave you contrasting comments
what did you do and how did you understand what they meant? For dancers, would
it have been useful to have another tutor for choreography?
Chris: I discussed with my tutor as well as
with Paul but I didn’t feel like one path was “the” right path to follow. My
tutor helped me quite a bit with the chords at the end. He also kept reminding me of the
concept of the piece, to the extent that I realized I couldn’t do anything
else.
James: Because so little of this piece was
written, I spent quite a lot of time with my tutor talking about the concept. We
discussed the idea that when you
hear your own work at a later stage, you start to see new problems in it that
you didn't see when you first made it, this being what Birtwistle calls a
'wound' in a piece. At a later stage still, a wound might heal, that is you no
longer find that aspect of the piece problematic, but a new wound might open up
somewhere else. I think it's quite a common process to go through with your own
work, even while still composing, and I think it definitely happened to us!
Sylvia: My tutor is Paul so he was familiar with what we were doing. I found
this helpful as he could offer his thoughts on the integration between music
and dance during the compositional process. When I went to have a lesson with
another tutor, to whom I showed a video but didn’t really explain the concept
in great depth, he commented more on the musical structure, and isolated the
musical aspect to make sure it was working on its own.
Yanaelle: Because I was busy with the
Crystal Pite project, Thomas went ahead to write the first section of the music
first. That set the tone for how I
worked after that. We worked by
sections. The first one was quite set and I created the movement along with
that. For other sections we
created the music and the movement separately based on the same idea. However there was one section where it
really didn’t work and we had to look at it again.
Lauren:
For the first time in this collaboration project, we had many more musicians
available for more rehearsals than before. How did that influence how you worked?
Chris: We didn’t have so many rehearsals
with the musicians. I had decided that I would finalize the piece after the
second week. Of course in the
third week we had the rehearsal with the dancers and musicians and I realized
that it didn’t work at all and had to go back to rewrite it.
Sze: Our situation with Sylvia was rather
that we didn’t have the musician or even the instrument confirmed till quite
late. But we did benefit from
extra time for bubbling of ideas that the other groups did not have.
Sylvia: I had to work with what was
available. I originally wanted to write for double bass and viol but double
bass was not available. So I ended
up writing for just viol and in the end I think it worked out better that way.
Sze: It would have been a totally different
piece.
Chris: It would have changed the texture of
the piece a lot.
Sylvia: Even with two instruments I would
have used them quite soloistically.
Lauren:
(For Jordan) What was your experience of the process?
Jordan:
As an undergraduate student I thought about how I can pull from the
experiences that I had from working with different choreographers, so that I
could make decisions and direct my dancers.
There is never a perfect performance. The question for me was whether as a
creator, I could let go? Actually a piece or a recording is a document of who
you were at a certain point.
Sze: You also can’t control audience’s
reactions (e.g. laughter) to your work.
Sze:
For dancers it’s usual to work with music but for composers it’s less common to
work with movement. How was the
experience for you?
James: I realized that it takes very little
time for things to shift and evolve in music, wheras in dance two minutes is a
very short time for a shift to happen. I thought about our perception of time
in seeing and hearing. Is it episodic or continuous?
Lauren:
How much did your pieces reflect the “haiku” of the workshop week?
Sze: The idea of other spaces and displaced
noises remained with us from the time I shut Sylvia in the cupboard!
Sylvia: I continued to think about how I
could displace sounds, musically and spatially.
Chris: We made a piece where I had just one
chord where the elements drop out one by one and Connor simply went from
standing to bending down, really slowly.
I think it influenced our concept quite strongly.
Yanaelle: For the haiku, I stood behind
Thomas on one leg, balancing, and he played a circular motion around the edge
of his singing bowl. The quality of both the movement and sound was used in our
final piece.
Music Collaborations
Performances created in
collaboration by students from London Contemporary Dance School and
Postgraduate students from Guildhall School of Music and Drama
5-6 December 2014, Robin
Howard Dance Theatre
1. Loop
Concept/Performance
by James Albany Hoyle, Chan Sze-Wei
2. Muliebris
Choreographer:
Katy Ayling
Composer: Hans
Hoeglund
Dancers: Laura
Ginatempo, Laura Lorenzi, Katrina Madrilejo
Musicians:
Trumpet/Flugelhorn; Chloe Abbott, Viola: Anna Luiza, Percussion: Dori Raphael,
Piano: Yung-Yueh Cheng
3. Aki
Choreographer:
Jordan Ajadi
Composer: Donghoon
Shin
Dancers: Laura
Ginatempo, Luke Crook, Josie Sinnadurai, Sophie Morgan
Musicians: Cello;
Andrew Power, Clarinet; Han Kim, Piano; Sebastian Espinosa, Conductor; James
Albany Hoyle
4. Without
Choreographer:
Connor Williams
Composer: Chris
McCormack
Dancers: Laura
Lorenzi, Katrina Madrilejo, Benjamin Eagles, Mari Ishida
Musicians: Violin;
Lyazzat Abisheva, Violin; Yi-Ning Liao, Violin; Monika Chmielewska, Piano; Ng
Yu Ching Shelley, Percussion; Vonald Chow, Electronics; Chris McCormack
5. Dessus de Souffle
Choreographer:
Yanaelle Thiran
Composer: Thomas
Fournil
Dancers: Luke
Crook, Benjamin Eagles, Joanna Kalm, Mari Ishida, Sophie Morgan, Josie
Sinnadurai
Musicians: Flute;
Toni Berg, Jack Michael Welch, Clarinet; Myles Wakelin-Harkett, Percussion;
Peter Ashwell, Singing Bowl; Mari Ishida
6. Feet of Bread
Choreographer:
Chan Sze-Wei
Composer: Sylvia
Lim
Dancer: Virginia
Scudeletti
Bass Viol: Liam
Byrne
Collaborations Tutors:
Lauren Potter, Paul Newland
