Daphna, Molly & Jeff

Rehearsal #1

Recap

We met at the dance building on Sunday 9/24 and began with short improvisations based on a single word that came to mind - attempting to create 3 minute works and used a stopwatch to see if we came close to that timing. We also did a guided movement improvisation with no instruments led by Molly. Some ideas that were generated from our meeting included:

• Considering audience participation, for example: pick a word, pick a feeling, have a process for generating something that’s outside this ensemble to guide an improvisation that we’ll embark upon
• Switching roles, for example: Molly: narrating a poem around the audience or her voice recorded and played jumping from speaker to speaker while Daphna and Jeff begin with movement. Or some other version of this idea.
• Generating ways to subvert our roles
• Structure - ways to break away from it, observe it, deconstruct it. This conversation had some roots in all of us having classical training and our practices evolving from space over time.
• Start every rehearsal with improvising together
• Come up with ideas prior to rehearsal that we want to try
• Observing the process in real time on stage - offering the whole performance process as the performance - from the warm-up to the post mortem
• Interested in issues with being a performer - quit or free yourself / the ups and downs

Rehearsal #2

Recap

We met at the dance building on Saturday 10/1. We talked about pink noise - filters through Max - Daphna explained how this works and the potential for using it in our project. We also talked about using the piano in the back of the room - see below for more details. We discussed minimalism in music and dance and structuring part of our work on accumulating material or a memory score type final improvisation. We did several improvisations with filtered noises in the background to see how it impacted us.

• We were excited by something that came up in an improv - an ending that breathes, that doesn’t quite end
• We considered the idea of rigidity vs. free form in sound
• Having piano repeat a cluster, pair that with max oscillators that slowly go off phase throughout the improvisation
• Definitely want to incorporate a section where we improvise together in our own disciplines - possibly at the end of the work, as a closer to the work, as we’ve found this to be interesting and successful - and have grown in listening to each other
• We also want to continue working towards moving as a group in these improvisations so that all three of us are thinking about our movement and spatial relationships
• We plan to work out an overall structure for the work in the next few weeks so we have a layout to work within.

Clips from one of our improvisations during rehearsal:

Rehearsal #3

Recap

We met at the dance building on Saturday 10/8. We began improvising right away considering in particular our spatial relationships--how we moved in relation to one another while we improvised together in our own disciplines. We noticed as a group from past videos that Molly was often the only mover and Jeff and Daphna were more static in place, so we did several task-based exercises to bring our sense of movement cohesion to the forefront. We did the following:

• Moved together through space (the “glacial” exercise) with flowing high energy as a prompt. Our space container was anything that fit inside the camera lens.
• Moved within the decided constraints / boundaries put in the space with high energy - Molly runs into the space to designate the beginning.
• Moved within the decided constraints / boundaries put in the space with “floating” prompt

We reviewed each improvisation, compiled into the YouTube video below and elected to move into the direction of creating a highly structure score so that we could begin practicing some of the aspects of the improvisations that we think have been most successful, and building from there. We recognize there are A LOT of things we could do and are ready to begin composing a work or at least setting some structures in place to work within.

This video is a compilation of our improvisations from rehearsal. Notice our attempts at connecting spatially while continuing to relate musically and across disciplines:

We are also interested in the ideas of arriving, and landing, from earlier rehearsals, and are planning to build from these texts:

We worked on cleaning up the movement (we are mostly "marking" in the video below), and working through the new musical idea to strip down the beginning section and build from there.

Daphna recorded Jeff playing different sounds and worked on building a recorded track that we can cue during the middle of the work to add a base layer of sound to round it out - especially in our most intense section.

11/15 - Below you can see us working out a section we are adding to elongate the more intense portion of the work so that it doesn't dissipate so quickly (a note we got from our last showing) and has time to build before it starts to crumble.

11/15 - Here we are marking through all the movement from the beginning section. It also spurred some interest, especially from Molly in the projection that was happening from another group and the shadows it created. She is going to work on putting some textures together to see if this might add to the work.

11/29 (#1) - Here we are working on the final section of the piece. We started with a few set ideas ... the walking back and forth and decided to improvise from there with the idea of responding to each other spatially. We were already somewhat familiar with the soundscape - floating/breathy.. however some news ideas also came up that we are planning to keep.

11/29 (#2) - This video shows us taking musical ideas and choreography we liked from our improvisation and setting it - expanding upon some ideas, sometimes adding choreography in places where we thought it was needed. We will continue with the version into the next rehearsal as we attach the beginning sections to this later section.

12/12 - We met to do a dress rehearsal before the final performance to clean-up any lingering details and to settle on what we plan to wear. We video taped two run-throughs and made final arrangements with sound and light cues with Kiran. Below is a video of our final run-through.