My workshop was entitled
Music as Performance – Theatre with Instruments
and the abstract read as follows:
This workshop will explore the potential that instruments can have on stage, and the act of ‘musicking’ as a mode of performance. Music can be theatrical and theatre can have musicality. Mainstream theatre productions like Sweeney Todd and avantgarde artists like John Cage, Laurie Anderson, or Heiner Goebbels, have all set precedents for this kind of work. We will engage in improvisations, exploring new playing techniques, placement in space and use of light to unleash theatrical expressiveness and narrative from musical instruments. Please bring your instrument(s), if you have any (you don’t have to be particularly good on them!) or come along without one. No experience required.
About 20 participants took part, some students, some theatre practitioners, opera singers, teachers, composers. We set out to undertake a range of experiments and improvisations, isolating very small basic aspects of musical and instrumental performance on the theatre stage. What make an instrument a theatrical object? What gestures or encounters with other bodies on stage change a musicians performance? How? Into what?
I was keen not to provide recipes or quick tricks on "how to...", but to get us all see and hear more acutely, notice small differences and think more about the interdependence of instrument and performer, space, light, movement etc. and the narrative, atmospheric, visual, sonic etc. potential they unfold.
There were already some good comments on twitter (#curtainupkent) - more comments and suggestions welcome!
(Photos (c) Matt Wilson)
A 12min video documentation filmed by Käroli Grenman and edited by Peter John-Morton (many thanks!)
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