Workshop at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury

I had a lovely time today giving a workshop at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury. This was part of a three day festival of talks, demonstrations, workshops and other activities of drama colleagues at the University of Kent seeking to make some of what we do accessible, interesting and relevant to a wider audience: Lifting the Curtain was the fitting title.

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!)

Peer review

The peer review system, which many publishers, including my prospective publisher Ashgate, use to ensure and increase the quality of their publications, is in many ways an excellent process. When it comes to your own manuscript, you do await the anonymous peer reviewer's comments with quite a bit of anxiety. This is likely to be the most critical reader you book will get, they are usually a respected expert in your field, and their verdict can create a lot of extra work or even cause a publisher to withdraw from a project.
So it was with great relief when I read the first sentence of the peer review for "Musicality in Theatre" which I had submitted in January:
"I very much enjoyed reading the manuscript, and think it will be an excellent publication"
Phew.
He or she then goes on to make a range of quite detailed suggestions for improving the manuscript, all of which I can understand and find helpful and constructive.
So now I am looking forward to rewriting certain chapters with this fresh and critical perspective in mind and hope to resubmit soon.   

A Review for Composed Theatre

A colleague very kindly forwarded Jackie Smart's review of Composed Theatre by Matthias Rebstock and me to me today. The review is hot off the press and appears in the latest issue of Theatre Research International (Volume 38 / Issue 01 / March 2013, pp 74 -75).

Jackie Smart writes:

"This book investigates a field of performance that operates between music and theatre, examining ways in which compositional principles drawn from music have been applied to theatrical performance, and theatrical thinking has influenced musical composition. It arises from two symposia organized by the editors at Exeter and Hildesheim universities which brought together academics and practitioners, and this starting point is reflected in the composition of the book through the way it brings together a diverse range of voices and perspectives, appropriately conveying the sense of scholars and artists engaged in ongoing debate about a developing form.

[…] The practitioners represented in Part Two constitute an impressive list, including Heiner Goebbels, Michael Hirsch, Jörg Laue, George Rodosthenous and Nicholas Till. Their engaging accounts illuminate the theoretical arguments of Part One and extend the book’s relevance and interest to anyone concerned with the messy, fascinating processes of collaborative creation. The ‘portraits’ of practitioners in Part Three bring into focus the key role of the performer as a creative contributor and highlight the presence of the personal within composed theatre, from the ‘biographical origins’ of Ruedi Häusermann’s inspiration to Daniel Ott’s interest in working with the personalities of his musicians. Part Four contains an intriguing selection of excerpts of discussions from the symposia and a concluding discourse analysis by Roesner in which he draws out and interrogates key principles and themes of this fascinating form of theatre-making. It is a style of performance of which I have had little direct experience but the book made me want to hear and see more."

Always great to read that someone enjoyed the book, found it engaging and useful – made my day!

Submission!

Last week I summoned my courage and gathered all the 'this will have to be good enough' attitude I could muster have made the final arrangements for submitting the manuscript to the publisher, Ashgate.
I am always amazed how time-consuming the final nitty-gritty layout, proofreading and harmonising is, but at some point even this minute and slightly numbing process is done, and it was time to let go. Not an easy process: one could of course continue working on a manuscript for ever, as there will always be a bit of new information, another reference, a new insight, another typo. So taking a conscious decision to stop fiddling is important.
Still, it is not quite the 'drumroll'-moment, the big finale with glitter and fanfare one secretly envisages throughout the process of writing, given that there will now be a relatively lengthy process of peer reviews, amendments, copy-editing, proofreading, chasing final publication rights for illustrations etc. etc. But despite all this, there is no denying that this project has reached an important milestone, and although I felt having to print all 474 pages was a bit unusual in our digital age, the sheer physical weight of the envelope I sent off brought this home to me quite nicely.

A Wordle 'summary'

I have recently discovered Wordle, which take any amount of text and creates a field of words that seem to be significant, ranking them by size and arranging them in a word cloud.
Based on my current draft, which is now almost 114.000 words, this is how wordle summarizes my forthcoming book:

Making some Noise...

As I have found the theoretical paths between Sound/Noise and Performance and Musicality to cross frequently, here are two quick links to recent events:

First, I just attended „Sound and Performance” – the 11th Congress of the Gesellschaft für Theaterwissenschaft (German Society for Theatre Studies) which was held from 4 to 7 October 2012 by the Institute for Music-Theatre Studies (Prof. Ernst, Prof. Mungen) at the University of Bayreuth and gave a keynote entitled: " Mind the Gap! ‘Noise’ in the performative production of sound ".

Second, Lynne Kendrick's and my book "Theatre Noise" (CSP) has just been reviewed very positively by Sarah Mauksch at http://www.theaterforschung.de/rezension.php4?ID=1571. Theaterforschung.de is the main German online hub for theatre scholarship, equivalent perhaps to SCUDD in the UK.

Here is a short excerpt with my translation:
"18 Beiträge liegen hier gesammelt vor, die sich kaleidoskopisch mit den unterschiedlichsten Blickpunkten um die Schlagworte „sound“/„noise“, „theatre“/„performance“ anordnen. Dass diesen so vielfach entgegnet werden kann, zeigt wie zwingend eine profunde Auseinandersetzung mit dem  Verhältnis der Begriffe gefordert war (und ist?). Dieser Band liefert dazu einen detaillierten Einblick in den Status quo der Forschung und den Anwendungsbereich des Theaters, das gleichzeitig Untersuchungsgegenstand ist. Meiner Meinung nach ist die Verknüpfung von Beiträgen aus der Wissenschaft sowie praxisorientierter Handhabe für Fragestellungen dieser Art äußerst sinnvoll. […]
Alles in allem spiegelt dieses Buch die Dringlichkeit zur Auseinandersetzung mit dem Themengebiet wider und den Herausgebern gelingt es, erste intelligente Schlüsse aus der Fülle an Informationen zu ziehen. Aus diesem Grund ist die Lektüre uneingeschränkt empfehlenswert."

"18 chapters are assembled here which are structured around the keywords „sound“/„noise“, „theatre“/„performance“  caleidoscopically from a wide range of viewpoints. That these keywords can be approached in such a variety of ways, demonstrates how timely a profound exploration with the relationship between these terms was (and is?). This volume provides a detailled insight into the status quo of the research and practice of a theatre that is at the same time its topic. In my opinion, the combination of academic contributions with reflections from a practice-oriented background is very sensible for this interrogation. […] All in all this book reflects the urgency of an exploration of this topic and the editors succeed in drawing first intelligent conclusions from the wealth of informations. Therefore reading this book is recommended without reservations."

I won't argue with that!

Speaking at TaPRA

I will be speaking about musicality in theatre today at the TaPRA conference at the University of Kent, where I have just moved two days ago. I am excited to discuss my work in the context of the working group for Performer Training in the 20th and 21st Century, which is not necessarily my 'natural' habitat, but since a lot of the discourse on musicality is intimately connected with questions of actor and performer training, it will be interesting to get feedback from this background.
I am also looking forward to hear Mario Frendo's paper, who also talks about musicality as dramaturgy: there are a lot of shared interest between our papers (e.g. musicality as emergence of rhythmical structures or melodic associations, as he describes it) but also areas where we approach the notion quite differently, which will make for a productive discussion, I am sure.
In the meantime, the book has progressed significantly and I am in the final stages of finishing the first complete draft and get it ready for proof-reading and further editing.