The project  ·  Ensemble Studies  ·  BLY  ·  The Hands. The Double.  ·  Seminars

Artistic work  ·  Can I both hear and see music?  ·  Composing through my body

Pianist Ellen Ugelvik writes about the processes creating and performing The Hands. The Double together with composer Henrik Hellstenius and choreographer Kristin Ryg Helgebostad.

On the day of the concert, I go out to buy a top. I find a fantastic, loose-fitting silk blouse; beautiful colours and patterns but not over-sweet. I feel strong wearing it, and at the same time liberated. I’m very pleased with it and start looking forward to the concert. I get Jørn Erik¹ to put the blouse on and sit at the grand piano in the Marmorsalen, the Marble Hall. I can see immediately that the blouse is too much. The material in our composition has to be neat, so that the different elements can rub together like hand in glove – elements that in themselves are just complicated enough to act as threads in the same web.

Kristin² talks about shining eyes or glowing lights at the back of the head that might help me to carry my gaze when I turn my head. She lectures me about warm energy vibrating in the large space behind my back while I’m playing, the secrets held in the circular pit behind the knee. That warm currents of something can connect the sole of my left foot to a corner of the ceiling. That the texture of my trousers can have a link to the bookcase, that the hand placed in my lap can raise the other arm; steer that movement. I realise that it’s beginning to work and will convert this into sound. When a tap drips in the bath, the sound of the drops are responsible for me lifting my arm. On stage I imagine a warm stream of sound from the ceiling caressing the back of my head and covering me like a heavy blanket as I arch my back.

I become aware of the many different ways my torso can twist around while I am sitting on the piano stool. There’s a big difference depending on whether the rotation is coming from my abdomen, my stomach, spine, shoulders, neck, face or ears.

The feet become important, the soles of my feet that are placed flat above the kilometres-thick layer of dark mulch and bedrock beneath the concert hall. I try to activate the room around me by imagining patterns of dancing, pulsating electrodes, flashing and glowing. I become part of something bigger, I hear and see myself from far away in space, I am floating upwards, while at the same time standing stock still. As I slowly rise to my feet, jerkily, from the piano stool during the piece’s first movement, I need this in order to be dangerous, as ‘grounded’ as Brant Bjork³ in his floor-length overcoat turning his back on the Rockefeller audience, unwavering. I want to be a demon going crazy on the organ at Notre Dame, playing until the stained-glass windows crack.

Shila⁴ creates a set of rules for me and Henrik. None of the elements will be included in this game if they have no overall point or value, or any potential for further development. We are after sounds and movements with corresponding natures. Henrik scrapes his nails over his teeth at the same time as scraping his nails over the keyboards. Gesture and sound are linked. Shila strokes her shoelaces while fiddling with the cables to her keyboard. This connects her to her keyboard. When I sit front-on between the instruments and play with one hand on each, connections are created between the two instruments via my body, and the rules of play have helped to define the stage space.

When Silje⁵ moves, everything she does looks cool. She metamorphoses into a big slender bird with gentle, rhythmic wingbeats as she bends forward over the piano stool between the instruments with her arms stretching backwards playing on one set of keys after another. Her body rocks from side to side and she glides over a huge landscape. I try to imitate Silje, and I watch the film we have made of myself afterwards. I don’t look much like a bird. My body is static and my forearms look so short with my taut brown muscles. My head looks weird atop my body and my neck appears graceless and stiff. It's discouraging, but then I recall what Håkon⁶ said the first time we played in Darmstadt and were nervously waiting backstage at the Orangerie, feeling the pressurized atmosphere in the auditorium and I was worried that we weren’t good enough, that we were about to flop. Håkon insisted: We are ourselves⁷.

If I can’t fly, then at least I can listen. Our material is, after all, centred around this; the connection between the musician’s body’s ability to absorb the sounds she is making, where the body becomes an intensification or extension of the sonic, or where sound and body act contrapuntally. And here, I need to be my self. The movements I am making with my body need to have a relationship to the sounds I am producing, a link to something that feels genuinely true or important, which becomes as equally anchored in my body as the more familiar act of listening to what I am playing on the piano.

The process engenders a new working method for Henrik and me, without us quite realising it. A game of give and take evolves, in which we swap the roles of player and observer. By mirroring each other and playing with each other’s ideas, it becomes clearer what works and what doesn’t, without us needing to put everything into words. The observer experiences something instantaneously, and afterwards can take that insight with them as we change places. At the same time this working method smooths out our original roles as composer and performer, and the potential power relationship implied by the former division of roles. Following the rules, we decide that we will both be on stage during the performance, and thus claim equal rights to the work.

When the movements are given a name, like ‘seaweed’, they are shut down in a way, leaving less room for my imagination.

I need to make friends with the keyboard. Because the project is so tightly bound up with the senses, the plastic keys feel slippery and the instrument offers no resistance. I am confused by its ‘touch’, which is so unsophisticated in comparison with the grand piano. The sounds have delay on them and when we experiment with so many different samples, I lose track of which sounds are triggered by which key, how long each sound lasts, and whether there’s any change in the sound. It’s strange, playing without being able to see the keys. I must learn to take whatever comes and enjoy the fact that every time is different. I can’t always tell if the timing is right.

I work on making my body more openly expressive, like a canvas. The movements I make need more ‘space’ in order to be perceived. It’s hard to get out of my usual posture, slightly bent, leaning forward, hunched over. I work hard on this using Kristin’s meditation technique, it becomes a transformation where I have to let go of what I thought was me at the instrument, a position that normally feels secure. By now I am starting with more distance from the keyboard, my head is raised, my shoulders and neck are more relaxed and sometimes I’m not even looking at the keys. This is unusual, but interesting. I’m sort of becoming someone else, and eagerly embrace this freedom that can arise in a situation where you are doing something you actually know you can’t do.

In the course of working on this project, I realise that I can often come across as strict and critical, rejecting ideas that are too wild. It’s like a relationship in which one partner might assume the free-spirited, playful role, while the other is more controlling. Why is it like that? Is it about the knowledge that, at the end of the day, it’s me that will be appearing on stage, that I’m afraid of seeming banal? Don’t I trust the material? My motivation for the project was to gain knowledge and experience of how to be able to move better on a stage, beyond just the playing, and how to perform movements that are connected to pure pianism. However, in the process of making the composition, the pianistic aspect has become completely central, and the basis for developing more movement-related material. While developing the work, I realise that the composition is more than a piece for piano and electronics: it is becoming a ‘performer-specific’⁸ work in which the connecting tissue between sound, text and movement runs through me and my specific body. For a musician the sensation of listening is a serious business, and I am fighting for the movements and the text to have the same high quality as my encounter with the sounds I am making on the grand piano. The movements have to be something I can ‘live’.

What is ‘lived’ or not becomes clear when, in one part of the piece, I mimic Kristin’s improvisation. After umpteen run-throughs using video footage of Kristin, I learn her movements, but when I watch our documentation video, this bit of the composition appears – in pure movement terms – more superficial. Kristin’s improvisation is not based on my body specifically, and I can see that I am triggering my movements too quickly, more like an imitation than something lived and heard. At the same time this part is tight and interesting to watch back in the video.

Often, in presentations of artistic projects, the people giving the presentation are the ones doing 70-80 per cent of the talking. Shila introduces the project group to the DasArts feedback method⁹. Using this method, our collective work changes direction and ends up receiving a wealth of feedback from the others without the presenter(s) having to defend or explain themselves at all. In this feedback method, the comments have to be concrete and relatively short, which suits me fine as someone who uses few words. When feedback is carefully structured and kept brief and to the point, a flood of open impressions are generated instead of concrete ‘advice’ and the construction of impulsive, personal associations which can accumulate into an intiutive logic. Here are some examples:

I sometimes see sound quality translated into movement quality. Not one on one, but more open, associative. Here sometimes the movements create more movement – the moving fingers on which sound strings seem to hang and move – or a space – the hand opening and creating a resonating space. I then can see the sound. It is where space and sound and movement somehow come together for me. It is sound resonating in space… Shila Anaraki

When it comes to scale moving a project from a small rehearsal space to a large concert hall I think of Gaston Bachelards words: ‘Moss can become a tree, but a tree can never become moss¹⁰’. Christian Blom¹¹

I sometimes see sound quality translated into gesture (smell, look, touch, covering the face…). This literal meaning of movement takes a step away from the connection to the sound because the sound is not literal. … Shila Anaraki

This kind of feedback, I feel, works extremely well in artistic processes in which our work is carried out in particular periods. The comments refer to the situation at hand, not necessarily comparing the composition with existing works, projects or musical genres, or the outlook, voice or style of other artists. It’s feedback that does not require an answer.

It’s a luxury to have a project group that keeps close tabs on each other and gains in experience by passing on constructive comments. And also to have such a time span at our disposal – three years – as well as an openness about where we want to end up, what we want to create. No specific demands are placed from outside. Such an ideal working situation is unusual for musicians in this field, I am more used to greater efficiency, brisker procedures. In hindsight, looking through the documentation video, it’s also clear to me that our artistic outcome, in other words The Hands. The Double, is a pretty extraordinary type of hybrid composition. It’s an unruly piece, and I do wonder whether our material really does hang together. With the premiere approaching, we had to make use of the efficiency we had learned, create a mould, find a way of moving forward. In retrospect, I think it would have been more interesting to present the composition as something else, perhaps as a working method for our field of interest more than as a finished piece? Perhaps the strongest outcome, artistically, is the working methods that Henrik, Kristin and I developed?

Camilla asks who the words in the last part of the composition are aimed at. What might be an internal logic for the performer in this section? What is the relationship between me and the words, is it a conversation with something that has its own consciousness or are the words there in order to open up another kind of layer in the composition? After various attempts to use other people’s voices from Henrik’s sample library – laughter, shouts and deep discussions in different languages – we conclude that it should be my voice used as the sampled material. We try out some Norwegian speech in my own dialect, but it’s too ‘close’. Camilla suggests that we use nice-sounding words such as ‘you’, ‘I’ and ‘push’, and Henrik makes the whole thing into a score in shifting time signatures and quarter-note beats using single words with no clear narrative and beautifully formed chords. Switching between keyboard and grand piano, I try to emphasise the quarter-note beats with my body movement, without prepare the chords too much so that the movement becomes too angular, but instead takes on a circular or bow-shaped effect.

At the time of writing, Henrik and I have performed The Hands. The Double three times. Some of the response we have had from the public is that it can seem as if I am driven by ‘other forces’, that attending a performance can be scary or even horrific. Other audience members have said that they can ‘see’ the music, that it is visible in my hands and arms. That the composition comes across as incredibly virtuosic and that it is obvious that I am listening with my entire body. The sounds and choreography make objects (including the piano) and bodies dissolve. The piano ‘vanishes as if by magic’!