EMUSIC-L Digest Volume 41, Issue 12 This issue's topics: "Baptism of Fire..." (3rd CASSIEL Performance Report.) (part 1 of 4) Your EMUSIC-L Digest moderator is Joe McMahon . You may subscribe to EMUSIC-L by sending mail to listserv@american.edu with the line "SUB EMUSIC-L your name" as the text. The EMUSIC-L archive is a service of SunSite (sunsite.unc.edu) at the University of North Carolina. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1992 17:57:49 +0100 From: nick@DCS.ED.AC.UK Subject: "Baptism of Fire..." (3rd CASSIEL Performance Report.) [Part 1 of 4] This is the third CASSIEL gig report. And it will be somewhat different to the first two. Gig #1 was two musicians playing the Electronica 1990, an electronic music festival featuring an eclectic selection of new and exciting musical ideas and influences - NOT. Gig #2 was myself playing a solo musical set. Gig #3 is yours truly as artistic director and producer for a contemporary dance project with live music plus performances from members of five different dance companies. CASSIEL is currently a contemporary dance company, with a few quid in the bank, a review in the quality newspapers and one (1) black leotard which might even make another appearance one day. (But not on me, I can tell you.) So, what of it? Well, I've just made one of my dreams come true. And I've also just been through what it probably the rockiest emotional roller coaster ride I can remember for a good many years. It's been very hard work and very complicated: probably one of the most complicated things (organisationally at least) that I've ever done. It's been very fraught, with a lot of hangups and insecurities flying around. And I've learned a *lot* in a very short period of time; about organising live performances, about working with performers in different media and disciplines, and not least about myself; I feel I've been through more, and learned more, in the last two weeks than in the previous five years. [Suggested reading at this stage: A Gift of Wings, Richard Bach.] At this stage I'd better decide where this is going to be posted. I guess a cross-post to rec.music.synth and rec.arts.dance would make sense, although I've never seen anybody post anything to them both before. Rather strange, that, since dance and music are obviously related, and since contemporary dance performances often use synthesised scores. Well, what the hell. If I can shake r.m.synth out of its usual "what's the best price for a Korg M1" and r.a.dance out of its "where can I do ballroom dancing in Aurora Illinois" in one go I'll have achieved something... For the tech-heads as well as the patience-challenged: KEY WORDS AND PHRASES: synthesised music, MIDI, live performance, contemporary dance, contemporary dancers, keyboard/sequencer throughput, improvisation, system reliability, critical software, critical dance teachers, decoupling of realtime systems, solo performers, MOTU Performer, press liaison, publicity, professionalism, temperamental MIDI managers, temperamental stage managers, virtual keyboards, MAX, fax, ClarisWorks, Stageworks, synth networking, social networking, OMS, artistic involvement, emotional involvement, love, lighting, rehearsal time, rehearsal space, PowerBooks, power politics, emotional confrontation, computer hangups, sexual hangups, winding down, overstepping the mark, overstepping the gaffer tape, a cathedral of light, several toy dolls, two giant leeks and half a dozen pairs of naff green shorts. Maybe I'll get onto all these things. Maybe not. I should perhaps explain that this is essentially a personal account, as in, it's an account containing one or two things personal, as well as objective comments. I'll name some names, and won't name others - no hard and fast rules about that, it depends how I feel when I get round to telling the particular stories. I suspect I'll do a lot of it just with first names, since, in true soap-operatic style, no two characters happen to share the same name. I wanted to avoid the common technique of using initials to refer to everyone - it looks silly and doesn't read very well - so I'll use first names and drop into third-person anonymity for anything which I consider remotely delicate. My main reason for writing this message is as a record to the whole project and what it was like to do it. I'll have this file, a few programmes and posters, a video recording, and a couple of newspaper reviews, which should be enough. WHY CONTEMPORARY DANCE: You may recall from the write-up of the Traverse show that I was rather dissatisfied with the whole process of standing in front of an audience playing keyboards without having more of a visual element (after all, there's only so long that you can look at an Apex stand before getting bored, and I'm not much more interesting visually when playing keyboards than an Apex), and so I started thinking about what I could do about that. I was also rather wary of getting into the usual business of setting up a bedroom studio, recording an album on cassette, trying to sell it just like the other several thousand young hopefuls with bedrooms and large electricity bills, and so on. That really didn't strike me as much fun, partly because of the competition and hassle of dealing with record companies, and partly because, well, it's not much fun. Working live, meeting people, expanding one's exposure to new ideas, and so on - that's more fun. I guess I still haven't answered the question: why contemporary dance? To be honest, until a couple of years ago, I was totally disinterested in dance and performance arts. From what I knew of it, I viewed dance as the sort of thing you saw on Channel 4 (unless you managed to turn it off first) - minority pretentious stuff, too arty for its own good, and not very relevant to anything. So arty and irrelevant, in fact, that I'd never actually gone to see any. Then, one day two years ago, for some reason or other, I went to see the Rosemary Butcher Dance Group perform at the DeMarco Gallery in Edinburgh. I was totally blown away by it, and I've been hooked ever since. I won't go into what was so good about it (I probably can't in words, or at least, not easily) but I was basically struck by a performance in a medium which I hadn't really paid attention to before. I think one of the reasons for dance perhaps being marginalised is that it's a very, erm, stratified art form. If it's not very good it just doesn't work. I can go and see a quite good film or read a quite good book and enjoy it. "Quite good" dance doesn't do a great deal for me; I find it technically interesting and I like the exposure to new ideas and concepts, but somehow it doesn't quite work. Dance has to be "very good" to really work for me. And when it does, it blows me away. The Rosemary Butcher performance blew me away. As did David Massingham Dance a year or so later; or the Terry Becke Troupe last year; or Yolande Snaith; or Dawn Hartley's solos in X-Factor's MayFest show last month. [At this stage you may wish to get a pen and paper and starting making notes of some of these names. We'll be meeting them again.] I saw dance as an obvious medium to try and explore. It obviously makes use of music (well, that's a blanket statement and there are interesting threads here but I don't want to follow them right now) and the relationship between music/sound and dance is basically a symbiotic one (another blanket statement...). What's more, dance works with the same kind of abstractions and imagery as I do in music. So much for the artistic motivation. At the time I was rather lonely and wanted some way of meeting new people, and people with whom I had something in common. I'd briefly circulated in the contemporary/new theatre circles and found that totally depressing: lots of mutual back-patting and cliquey behaviour, and as an outsider I was basically somewhere below the correct social level and status to come into these people's field of view. (Interestingly perhaps, I had more trouble with the directors, administrators, media people and so on than the actual performers, who were generally quite normal if you could get to them through the crowds of hangers-on.) And, to be a little more pragmatic for a second, there ain't exactly thousands of aspiring musicians trying to get into the contemporary dance scene - Edinburgh has, to my knowledge, three musicians working in the area, of which I am one. For that matter, dance doesn't exactly have a huge scale; it has high profile (professional performances, Arts Council grants, press coverage, etc.) but with a small circle of performers and administrators, certainly here in Scotland which (I believe) boasts no more than thirty professional dancers. What this means is that the top of the scene isn't very high up; I know the "big" professional dancers and choreographers here as a result of some introductions and one or two phone calls. Contrast that with the pop music scene. What else was I going to say? Oh yes, dancers are interested in new sources of music - that might seem obvious, I dunno. But, when I've explained that I'm interested in doing music for contemporary dance, the dancers have generally been interested in me; compare *that* to the pop music scene, or the theatre scene for that matter. I'm rambling here. Let me see where I'm going... Ah, yes. So, about a year or eighteen months ago I was attending a good number of dance performances in Edinburgh and moreso in Glasgow, which seemed to be running one dance festival a month. Lovely place, Glasgow, and it has a good venue for contemporary arts with lovely performance spaces and, at the time, an excellent vegetarian cafe - very important I can tell you. I didn't at the time make much contact with the performers - I guess I was expecting the same kind of snobbishness and so on that I'd been subjected to in the theatre world, and was rather reluctant to introduce myself as a result. (Hold that thread: I may come back to it.) I did have a chat with Alan Grieg of X-Factor (which is Edinburgh's professional contemporary dance company, to all intents and purposes, and is three strong, the other two being Dawn Hartley and Brigid McCarthy (I hope you're making notes)) after one of their performances in Glasgow, about whether they would be interested in any music (hmm, actually, come to think of it, I seem to remember that I also had ulterior motives here - I was actually rather interested in talking to one of the other performers... but let's not get into that right now). Apart from this brief contact, I was basically Audience: buy a ticket, go see the show, applaud, go home. For almost every show I saw I was paying close attention to the soundtracks and thinking, "hmm, I'd love to talk to these people and do some music for them or something." I considered my chances of doing that to be as high as that of playing keyboards with Jean-Michel Jarre. Dreamsville Arizona. Several months after this I guess, I was introduced to Sheila via a mutual acquaintance at work. Sheila has danced in Johannesburg and was getting into the contemporary dance scene in Edinburgh, attending classes of various kinds and styles, and so on. Sheila has basically been my contact into the entire dance scene; since she attends classes and workshops run by the performers she got to meet them quite naturally and I got to meet them through her, which is something that would have been difficult for me to do on my own. So, without Sheila, none of any of this would have happened. Now, there is a community dance group called Offshoot. (Make a note of that name as well.) (Hmm, actually I've just been informed that it's not a "community group" in terms of manifesto or whatever, but I'll stick with that description for now.) Offshoot's director teaches various kinds of dance (jazz, flamenco and so on) and runs Offshoot as (as far as I see it) a vehicle for letting her various students perform on stage. Let me say something here and put forward some personal impressions that might come across as snobbish, but I'm trying to be honest and tell you what I'm trying to do here. The phrase "community {dance,theatre} group" has two very different meanings. Meaning #1 is a vehicle for giving performers from "the community" a chance to get up on stage every now and then and show to friends, family and public what they've been doing in classes, as well as get the enjoyment and thrill and experience of live performance. Meaning #2 is a vehicle for letting the same performers make art and take it as high as they can, out of whatever community we're talking about here and into Real Venues, in front of Real Audiences, reviewed by the Real Press, and so on. As you can probably guess, I'm into the latter. I'm quite willing to try and get a show into the Assembly Rooms, Traverse or CCA in Glasgow ("OK then, who do I have to fax?"). While I see the motivation and value of community art #1, I'm not interested in doing it - it's too insular for me, it's not a context in which you can really be creative and work with brave new ideas, and I don't think it pushes the performers to aspire. It's one thing to take material from dance classes and put it on a community stage, but if you're wanting to play the Traverse or CCA then you'd damn well better come up with something to say artistically and then make damn sure you work hard getting it right otherwise you're going to get trashed by the critics. This is what's called "motivation." (I'm not saying that putting something on a community stage doesn't take hard work or dedication btw - that would belittle it - but it's a different aspiration.) [Note for the tech-heads: yes, I'll get round to describing the keyboard rig. Just give me a chance...] So, we have a couple of potential tensions here (and I'm also going to get personal about this for a second or two, since I think this is an important point). One is that Offshoot is, as far as I can see, basically community dance #1; CASSIEL is a sort-of combination of community dance #2 and a pro/semi-pro music/dance company. As for the other tension, well, Offshoot is a vehicle for the styles of dance its members do in classes, which means that any performance programme is going to feature bits of jazz, flamenco, whatever, and not necessarily a great deal of hard-core contemporary stuff which is what I'm into. Oh yes, there's another tension here, I think (though I'm trying to read between the lines here, I admit, not being that closely associated with the company): I don't think there's much scope for any of the performers to strike out and choreograph something new and too way out without hitting the walls and running into artistic differences with the director. In a company like X-Factor, the performers are the choreographers and the company is a vehicle for them to create new work. Offshoot is a company to perform dance class material. Well, not always. The Scottish Arts Council had funded a choreographer (Stephen Hooper) to put together a contemporary piece for Offshoot. This was quite a major project, as it was complex movement-wise and used a large number of performers. It was also quite demanding of lighting design (more of which later). But this was the highlight of the Offshoot set, and also an important one to get right since the Arts Council would be present for the performance, and Steve's funding was riding on its success. Why am I talking about Offshoot at all? Stay tuned. What next... First off is the Stirling Dance Base thing. At this time (last November?) Sheila and I sort-of hatched a plan for a contemporary dance piece. I honestly can't remember whose idea it was; I do remember a run through my patches on the Wavestation to get some initial ideas for textures, and I remember it taking a week or two before Sheila came up with the exact theme for the piece. (I'll remark at this stage that Sheila and I actually have somewhat different tastes in dance; Sheila's tastes veer towards what I might call physical theatre, with definite stories, explicit costumes and props, and so on. I tend to go for stuff which uses pure movement and abstract gestures, precisely focussed and controlled, which paints pictures in my imagination. The point here is that I was getting involved in a project rather different to the sort of thing I had actually been imagining, which is interesting, and probably positive.) Over the following two months or so we put together the piece, which ended up around 13 minutes long. The music and the dance were basically prepared in parallel, and in a similar style in terms of overview. I draw pictures when composing music, where frequency is vertical, time is horizontal, and there are various lines and boxes of scribbled words for describing moods and textures, fades, development, visual images, and so on. (Think of Schulze's pictures in Black Dance/Timewind; similar to that, but not nearly as concrete in terms of synthesis techniques and notes.) Interestingly, Sheila's pictures looked almost identical to mine, except that they were illustrating moods, emotions, speed and style of movement, and so on. There were some common elements (tempo, richness, etc.) but not many; the points of contact were things like "tension", "constriction", "pressure", "floating", "resolution and reprise", and so on. We had to keep the music and dance development coherent in terms of running time, so there was a lot of looking at various chunk lengths in Performer, lengthening or shortening sections by a minute here and there in order that certain movement sequences could develop and work in time. We didn't talk much about bar counts, which surprised me a little, just running times which probably have more bearing on how a section comes across to an audience. These were also early stages where details didn't matter. I won't bore you with the details of composition; it was the sort of process I usually do. Everything sequenced from Performer, with quite heavy use of the Wavestation (at that time running the old Version 2 firmware) - didn't I say months ago that the WS is an ideal instrument for contemporary dance? It actually came into its own for some of the other dance sets, but I'll get onto that later. I did a lot of programming of the WS effects processors, with the Lexicon MRC giving me realtime control over them. Some of the distortion and overdrive effects are lovely; shame it can't chorus quite like a VFX. To cut a long story short, there was a finished piece of music within a couple of months, and Sheila and Roanne (whom I should have mentioned earlier - by this time she was the other half of this dance group later to become known as suddenlylastsummer) were choreographing and learning the material ready for the Stirling Dance Base. Perhaps I should explain at this stage what the Stirling Dance Base thing is about. Susan Hay is an organiser of dance initiatives (as far as I can tell; sometimes it's hard to pin down exactly what it is that these people do...) which means that she pushes bits of grant money around, books venues, and puts together the occasional short run of dance shows (possibly in one place, possibly touring) which bring together a selection of acts into each evening's performance. This sort of thing happens in Glasgow with New Moves (which is actually a fully-fledged dance festival, come to think of it), the various Stamping Ground projects there and in Edinburgh, and so on. The Stirling thing was three or four acts made into a programme to run for two evenings. Initially the idea was to do the thing with live music (i.e. Rig Rothwell installed and running); however, I thought this might be overkill for a piece that was under 15 minutes in length, especially in the context of a show containing other, unrelated, performances. In the end the point was moot since the choreography and music rehearsal weren't complete in time, so the piece was shown as a work in progress, with the middle section omitted and the music coming from tape. I don't have much of a gig report for this event - hitting the play button on a cassette deck isn't very interesting. With Stirling over, we were left with an uncompleted piece, although the music was complete at this stage (barring some alterations which were made later to accommodate changes in the choreography). Obviously Sheila and Roanne were looking for some opportunity to show it properly in completed form. The opportunity which came up was the Edinburgh Spring Fling, a community arts festival covering dance, theatre, music and so on and running in a number of venues throughout the city. (I know. I'm not doing community art. So, sue me.) And there were even small sums of grant money available for it. We decided to fill in some forms. It's here that we really get to the nuts and bolts of CASSIEL's involvement as an entity. (Yeah, it's got to be upper case because of the logo.) In order to get things running, I volunteered to be artistic director for what was, to start with, primarily a vehicle to show this piece. Using the name CASSIEL seemed as good a move as any, and over the following few months CASSIEL moved from being myself playing music to being essentially a contemporary dance company. The application was accepted, and we were given seventy pounds to spend on costumes and miscellaneous expenses. Actually, deciding how much money to apply for was a case of complete guesswork, since I didn't have much idea what expenses we'd incur, this being the first time I'd done anything like this. I've not done the accounts yet, but I think we're about even, even though some of the expenses (such as rehearsal space hire) were completely unforeseen. I also had to give some thought to what I could spend grant money on. This was rather delicate - there are things that are basically privately owned (like any bits of music hardware I acquire) and I don't expect to be able to buy, say, a Kurzweil K2000 or an Outbound Portable with council grant money. Contrast that with one-off, non-capital, expenses which were specially for this performance, or with consumables (make-up etc.) - no problem there. One tricky case was the van hire for moving the music gear - some dancers were reluctant to see the transport of the instruments as vital to the performance ("why can't we use tape?"). We should have had some serious policy meetings about this, I reckon in hindsight; we didn't as it happens - I just paid for the van. I guess there's no hard and fast rules here. My point is that these issues of demarcation of money and resources are actually tricky, and I reckon that many a small performance company (and the odd large one) has folded due to the ensuing disagreements in policy. It was obvious at this stage that I'd need more material from somewhere in order to build a complete programme. In fact I sort-of had something on the back burner. After the Traverse set I'd been in touch with a dancer named Helen about doing another Traverse appearance, same format and running time, but this time with combined music and dance. That was last summer, and I came up with a good deal of music for it, but the project didn't get off the ground at that time for a variety of reasons, not least of which was a couple of months of composers' block on my part. That project got relaunched in January for some reason. One of the reasons, in fact, was the arrival of the V3.13 firmware for the Wavestation: that gave me access to the vocoder effects processing, and launched me into a frenzied few days of programming resulting in the main ideas for a piece of music which Helen really liked and wanted to dance to. (You see folks: the WS *is* a machine to unleash your creativity in new directions and make new sounds never before heard. Just like the ads say.) So, this was, what, mid January. At about this time my copy of Opcode MAX arrived (three months late: frozen points at Clapham Junction). The idea was to port the music from Performer to MAX and build some performance structures around it, and then improvise. For various reasons this didn't happen (see my notes about MAX programming below), resulting in the project getting pushed past the closing date of the Traverse which was preparing to move to its new site (a totally subterranean contemporary theatre installation - technically really impressive). So, I had a dance project that I could roll into some other performance window. (That's a clever technical term that professional dancers use. Actually, I'm lying. I just made it up.) [Continued in EMUSIC-L Digest, Volume 52, Issue 13] ------------------------------ End of the EMUSIC-L Digest ******************************