AP 2.2.a Rehearsal/Workshop videos
Before inviting other musicians and performers to work with us we recorded some of the outcomes of the workshops. A video collecting some recordings from our various workshops can be found below. Top are May 2021 workshops with Wanshu, middle the recording of Jingya Peng exploring our scenery created for scene 1 and bottom for scene 2.
AP 2.2 Cycle 2
Following on from this we began the second cycle which involved working with the designer Wanshu Li during spring 2021 and choreographer Jingya Peng in summer 2021. Our aim was to explore the piece through a series of workshops making use of Wanshu’s UV reflective materials and Jingya’s and our (mine and Oliver’s) response to them as performers.
AP 2.2.b August 2021 Open rehearsal
At the point of entering the workshop towards the open rehearsal, in August 2021, we still had 3 scenes left to write and wanted to bring the choreographer and designer in at this early stage, alongside the experience of performing our current work to a live audience, so we could incorporate their ideas and responses into the creation of the final 3 scenes of the work. We fully immersed ourselves in Wanshu’s material, exploring various scenic set-ups, and spent a week with her and Jingya, playing with the music and materials, to find a way of performing with Wanshu’s work.
After we had done several explorations ourselves, we spent a further two days rehearsing the music with a full ensemble two more singers, and an extra dancer, to perform for an audience at an open rehearsal of scenes 1-4 with half of scene 5. Please see the results of the feedback forms and the participant feedback from this performance attached below (Blatt et al., 2021).
Much of the feedback was as we expected from such a rough performance of an in-progress work, after such a short period of rehearsal with the whole team. It was very valuable to have the comments of the audience and to start to understand our successes and failures. There was a lot of positive feedback, but in particular we were able to see that a lot of the movement needed to be more clearly defined, and we needed to reconsider how we placed the ensemble and the singers. We also needed to begin considering how we would make use of microphones and amplifications for the singer’s voices. In the open rehearsal we had two dancers performing with the materials and presenting the characters, whilst the singers sat with the ensemble and sang the story. Several people mentioned that it might be nice to have the singers on stage as part of the work as well. Ultimately this led us to decide to not involve dancers but to ask the singers to be much more active and learn elements of choreography and to explore more physical movement. We also condensed the text and music in scene 1 so that we could employ only 4 singers for performing this work (due to budgetary constraints). Many of the design elements and materials used in this open rehearsal were dropped before moving on to the next stage of development. We also changed some of the music due to difficulty in learning and singing it at this rehearsal stage.
