Five Pieces For, With, About or Because of Dance (My year as Rambert Music Fellow #6)
The past year is impossible to
summarise. I know that some of the hundreds of creative portals that have
opened up for me will continue to materialise at different times, it would be
strange to choose a few now and shut off all the rest. What I can highlight for
now are those opportunities that solidified into performances or more tangible
things: music and dance are transient, but there a few milestones that I will
always remember from my year with Rambert. I’m hugely grateful to the PRS
Foundation and the Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation for making the fellowship
possible, and of course every dancer and every member of staff at Rambert for
making me so welcome and teaching me so much. For this written attempt at
capturing even a glimpse of my myriad experiences this year, I’ve chosen to
focus on the two pieces that I created with and for Rambert: Solo Matter and Imaginary Situations.
Solo Matter
An intense, challenging, inspiring, perspective-changing collaboration
with choreographer Carolyn Bolton that led to a further collaboration with
Mbulelo Ndabeni, who danced the solo at the National Theatre River Stage and
worked with us in the second stage of the creative process. Mbulelo went on to
perform Solo Matter again in
September with N’da Dance at Richmix.
Carolyn and I met in February and
instantly started fizzing with ideas – these inexplicably fizzled out in the
studio and we were suddenly faced with a blank canvas. This was a good thing,
as we were forced to improvise and some wonderful moments occurred that we
couldn’t possibly have planned. The creative contributions of Edit Domoszlai
were invaluable at this stage of R&D: the three of us experimented with
various permutations of a duet around a table that used percussive sounds and their
accompanying actions. The final piece, after five months of conversations and
meetings and rehearsals and debates and friendship, barely resembled these
initial images (although the table vanished and then morphed gradually into a
bench) but those percussive noises formed the whole of my electronic track.
What started as a few innocuous clicks, sweeps, taps and thuds became a manic,
distorted, hyper-complex piece of musique concrète.[1]
My computer still has approximately thirty different versions of this track and
the choreography went through a similarly rigorous testing process: I think
this piece is testament to the idea that an artwork is a map of decision-making
that has taken place, in many ways consisting more of what has been left unsaid
than of what has been said. Similarly here I am not attempting to describe the
message, movement language or inspiration behind Carolyn’s captivatingly fresh,
fearless and feverish choreography for Solo
Matter as it is best experienced.
You can hear an excerpt of Solo Matter here.
And watch the trailer here.
Imaginary Situations
The title I gave to my 45-minute electronic track created for Julie
Cunningham and Company’s your ten thousand eyes, an utterly intriguing piece of choreography that was partially
created amongst the artefacts of the V&A and later remoulded and set
against the London skyline on the roof of the Southbank centre.
Having been bewitched by several
of Julie Cunningham’s shows, I was utterly delighted when she asked me to write
something for her summer Southbank performance. It was a daunting task: Julie’s
work is abstract yet exquisitely detailed, and I had never made 45 minutes of
electronic music before.[2]
Her approach was wonderfully open, as she invited me to make something that we
could put together with the dance at the end. This was surprisingly successful,
as I had space to observe her work and discuss concepts with her without being
restricted in terms of structure or themes. I did take note of the context, pacing
and mood however, and this created the piece for me, as it became an expression
of how I felt while watching Julie’s work and while walking around the
Southbank. The soundscape of that part of London fed into the track, although
much of it was purely synthesized (created using my keyboard and computer
software). A beautiful part of the end result was that each performance synched
up with the track in different ways: sometimes a sound would catch the end of a
gesture, sometimes a real-life train would pass simultaneously with a sampled
one.
You can hear an excerpt of Imaginary Situations here.
And read an interview with Julie about her previous work To Be Me here.
Three Miniatures
After working with choreographers
Peter Leung and Pierre Tappon in December, and subsequently visiting Dutch
National Ballet in February for Positioning
Ballet and Made in Amsterdam, I
was invited back for a workshop with Het Balletorkest, conductor Matthew Rowe
and composer Tarik O’Regan. This was in every way a brilliant learning
experience as I had the opportunity to experiment with orchestration and to ‘live-compose’
with a symphony orchestra in front of me! You can read about Het Balletorkest
here.
The Windhover
A setting of the Gerald Manley
Hopkins poem that I wrote for the Hermes Experiment as part of Paul Hoskins’ Rambert Connects initiative for
composers and choreographers. The fellowship is a way of facilitating
composer-choreographer interaction, and Rambert
Connects, along with Rambert’s mini residencies, was a part of that. You
can find out about the Hermes Experiment here.
Citizens of Nowhere
A 12-month effort that started
with Dane Hurst at the Cohan Collective… and ended with Dane Hurst, three
dancers and seven RNCM musicians at Tête à Tête opera festival with ACE Grants
for the Arts Funding and private sponsorship. It grew from a 3-minute miniature
to a 40-minute opera-ballet. There’s just too much to begin to say about
writing and producing it, so why not watch it here instead…
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