AJ, Carlos & Kiran

December 20

A week after our final performance, each of us are still radiating with the collaborative energy that made for a powerful showcase. This unique event was preceded by a rigorous week of installing our components in the performance space:

Hanging our supplemental screens proved no match for the craftsmanship and handiness of Carlos.

We decided to get creative with the hanging of our percussion "instruments." The resources in the workroom were extremely valuable, and we even had some fun making it happen! Rest assured that the beer bottles were empty upon entering the studio.

Another feat of engineering and creativity: heavy weight caribeeners and parachute cord were able to suspend a 50 pound Thai gong from the ceiling. This made us all very nervous, but it held up just fine. 

We debated for quite a while about whether or not to issue a trigger warning before our performance, as much of the subject matter was extremely powerful and had the potential to make people uncomfortable. Ultimately, we decided against doing so. In the era of Facebook and Twitter, users scroll through feeds that are peppered with cute videos, personal life updates, memes, and images and videos of unimaginable terror all over the world. Part of our performance was to draw attention to the atrocities in the world that we too often skim over and choose not to think about. A trigger warning would have likely taken away from the impact we were going for. It was our sincere hope that people were drawn into the realities of millions of people overseas, and felt that artists have a responsibility to find a voice that can respond.








Nov 21
Kiran likes working in musical scores- here is her score for the different sound components. This piece will be entirely through-composed. Carlos has confirmed the dancers for our performance

Nov 20
We have a couple videos of us exploring two sound worlds which will be embodied in our piece.

1) Bottle Exploration




2) Gong Exploration







October 20th 2016
We plan seeing a show this weekend to continue to foster ideas of creativity.  We wanted to post some of our (WIP)

I know our goal is to continue to bring more form around our score, in addition to seeing how we will add and develop visual ideas to complement the arc of the work. 




Our apologies for the lack of updates so far! This is certainly no indication of our artistic progress. Two weeks ago, the team spent some quality time together in Downtown Ann Arbor getting to know one another as people. We fully believe that developing this connection is extremely important in artistic collaboration.

First, we spent time sharing our musical tastes with each other in order to get a grip on what we are into. After exploring this, AJ and Carlos met up in the Dance Department and jammed with a group of dancers that he teaches. AJ played in a few styles and tried to emulate the music that Carlos and his cast typically use to explore their movement and choreography with. The experience was very exciting, and we can't wait to get back in the studio to dive deeper into this artistic communication and exploration. We can't wait to take this acoustic experimentation into the electronic realm - definitely the next step in our creative journey.

Here is a video from the jam that we had in the dance studio last week.


https://www.dropbox.com/s/403jckhanlcvtfm/DSC_3832.MOV?dl=0

(Not sure how to embed videos directly from Dropbox. Sorry!)