Displaying news from 1 September 2007 to 1 October 2007.
written sunday, 24 June 2007, for www.thetipdown.com - as yet unposted.
several months ago, i was approached by my good friend and long time musical collaborator, red wierenga, about joining a group that was about to form which would combine improvised music with improvised theater. i agreed, and we began several weeks of intensive rehearsals in preparation for our first string of gigs to take place at the PIT (peoples improv theater). those rehearsals were striking in their rawness: we were all feeling out a new art form, in which actors and musicians were forced to co-exist and to make things of which we did not know what they were. the musicians' material was suddenly a companion to text and even plot; the actors' flights could be jolted or couched from one instant to the next by a shifting score. one of the more difficult things to get hold of was this constant power-shifting from musicians to actors: who's influencing who here? from time to time we would each fall into traps set by our experiences and our expectations. the goal of many of the rehearsals was to shake off these shackles to allow for the new to make the grand appear.
this group of 4-5 actors and 4 musicians, now with the moniker FACE, took to the stage for the first time on friday, june 8th, following a prop-heavy comedy improv group. what sets FACE apart from most PIT performers (besides the equal billing of actors with musicians--and indeed the presence of musicians at all) is that while most acts would be categorized as "comedy improv," we'd set our goals on being an improvising group in the larger sense: comedy and absurd dialogue would appear, ideally, but so too could dance, movement, song, stillness, pantomime... in fact it's that aspect of the group that makes it so difficult to judge the success of the performances. within musical improvisation, this feeling is also reached when one removes the potential coil of "the genre" and just plays. when you make the decision that anything goes (and you're not just going to restrict yourself to a cyclical musical form), there can be a strange connection between the ecstasy of choosing, and the vertiginous nausea at the number of choices. indeed, many musicians who claim to play "free improvisation" are covertly restricted to their desired image of what that "should sound like." composer karlheinz stockhausen refers to the utopic improvised music as "intuitive music" and urges people who practice it to in fact avoid what is habitual in one's playing:
"of course sometimes you get rubbish. the first sign of it is when preformed material appears, citations, when you are reminded of something that you already know. then we feel it's going wrong, that instead of automatically recording, there is something in us automatically playing back recorded rubbish.... while there may be no pre-established style for the whole music, certain stylistic elements come into it, and i would try to avoid them, and draw completely on intuition.... whenever the groups come into rage, as i call it, when their playing becomes very heated, [Portal, the clarinet player of the Globokar group] starts playing typical free jazz melodies and configurations that he has played for years, being a free jazz player: certain idioms that come from the group he plays free jazz with, others that belong to the free jazz tradition in general."
(from "stockhausen on music: lectures & interviews" compiled by robin maconie)
of course, others have similar initial feelings, but take quite different stances: i recall reading an interview with misha mengelberg and han bennink in a jazz magazine several years ago in which they commented on the fact that "swing" could co-mingle very well within "free improvisation." to them, the whole idea of freedom was that they could do what pleased them at that moment, and not be forced to play only the gestures commonly attributed to the free jazz idiom. or even, indeed, that they can lift melodies (citations) from traditional jazz. that's the freedom of misha and han: one that allows for a reluctantly ironic chorus of irving berlin's "white christmas" in the midst of more "intuitive" improvisations.
and it's this use of musical (and of course, theatrical) "call-backs" that FACE leans toward in her improvisations. our current work (we're only 3 live shows deep, mind you), like misha and han's, relies on pastiche---"the clownish face on social justice, a joke with deep seriousness," in the words of wendy steiner---to make new objects, of which we recognize some pieces, yes, but can't quite place our finger on what they are. i'm reminded of an image from arakawa and madeline gins' book, "the mechanics of meaning" wherein there's a photo of an object---a sort of dowelish thing made up of what seem to be worn wooden beads---with scrawling underneath that reads: "gradually arrive at what this is through at least ten guesses." it's in the avoidance of this engagement with the sort-of-known that stockhausen's theories of intuitive music tend almost to pale. the space between the unknown and the almost-unknown is where the most potent art---musical or otherwise---appears to reside.
check out FACE online at: http://www.myspace.com/faceimprov
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