Richard's Post

KONSTEPIDEMIN December 2012
It's the end of my week long residency here in Gothenberg at the The Dansbyran.  Until Monday, I had never worked with Stephanie creating new work and especially not at this intensity.  I met Mamoro for the first time this week...

Our starting point was to use the book "Notations" by Theresa Sauer, and choosing a couple of scores that spoke to us from the book, begin translating these music notation (these were not standard form stave music notations as some and most, were paintings and drawings  and artistic translations and guidelines of how the composers wished their compositions to be played) into our own physical movement responses attempting to stay as close as possible to the material presented in front of us.  the three of us come from very different backgrounds, Mamoro especially with no dance practice experience whatsoever, so the results were fascinating and exciting.  Other exercises involved making our own movement scores and passing them to one another to interpret and perform.  We then created further material from scores from the Notation book and one person would step out  of the room while the remainder performed their material to the other for them to notate in their own way.  The person who was out of the room would then return to read the new notation and interpret it as accurately as possible.  Exercises continued in this vain with different variations including the addition of the voice combined with movement taking inspiration again, from chosen scores from the Notations book.  We continued with these themes and ideas and the big question of how and what to translate from given scores and further more, movement material from one person to another and how that transforms from one person to another - what is lost and what stays...

The residency has been very enjoyable, satisfying, challenging and an absolute joy to work with two wonderful artists, which is never a given, especially when working with new people and ideas.

Mamoru Iriguchi`s post

On Encoding/Decoding>>>
If you have a skill to read music and play the piano reasonably well, you can learn a little piece by Chopin after a few hours of practice. Your performance would probably sound not too dissimilar to what was played by the composer for the first time. This is because the conventional notation system in music (i.e. music score, which is not music itself) is so efficient that it allows composers and musicians to encode and decode musical pieces very accurately.

On Translation>>>

It was refreshing to learn that there are many contemporary composers who deliberately choose NOT to employ conventional notation system to encode their work. Instead, they use extremely free and radical forms. As a result, I suspect that a same score produces tunes that sound very different every time it is performed. The composers’ intention in notation here is totally different from that of Chopin. It is probably not so important for them to make performers replicate what composers heard in their heads. Instead, what really counts is the process of (often spontaneous) ‘Translation’ that happens when the music score has been read by the performers. Unlike Decoding, the objective of Translation is present  the piece to the audience in best possible way they can think of (like when you are translating a foreign novel), therefore, various elements can be added to/deleted from/modified to the original in the process of translating.

On Translation of Movement>>>

We played with the notion of ‘Translation’ in many ways through this residency. As we (Stephanie, Richard and myself) came from fairly diverse backgrounds, a little movement sketch that had gone through these three bodies (by mirroring movement as well as writing  text and sketches) turned out to be something quite dramatically different from the original while there is something that remained all way through.

The sharing was satisfactory as we managed to make a fairly cohesive presentation of the Translation process by displaying it stage by stage. It feels crucial to explore and discover playful and functional ways to integrate this Translation mechanism within the piece in the future development.

Sharing

Yesterday we presented some of the outcomes of our residency in a work in progress sharing to a small group of people at Dansbyran. Also present at the sharing were choreographers Moa Sahlin and Paula de Hollanda who together with Marika Hedemyr own and run the studio as a cooperative.

The sharing was encouraging, with the audience generously contributing their responses and own ideas to our performance. There was a sense that everyone wanted to see the next stage of development.

We had broken up the movement material with projections of visuals which we used as starting points, and also our own drawings which we used in the translation process. This format made it very comfortable and relaxing for us to perform, reminding us of the moments when we created the materials. It was reassuring that that same feeling crossed over to the audience. We started to think about ways of how the audience could participate.

In the studio

During this week long residency at Dansbyran in Gothenburg, Mamoru, Richard and me are working together for the first time. Coming from different points of references, such as music, choreography, stage design and performance art, we are looking for a common language that allows us to create and understand each other`s movements with ease and allows us to stay playful. Translation is becoming our main theme.

Picture: Score by composer Dan Marmorstein taken from Notations by Theresa Sauer

Mamoru Iriguchi/ Richard Court/ Stephanie Schober

I am about to start a new collaboration with performance artist and set designer Mamoru Iriguchi and dancer and singer Richard Court. We have been invited to a residency at Dansbyran in Gothenburg supported by the Swedish Arts Grants Comittee.

We will be blogging about our process here.