I would like to add a comment from one friend that was in the concert (she is a singer): It was incredible how you where breathing from the diaphragm while playing, I could feel your breath down from the audience.
After I received this feedback, I can affirm what I wanted to demonstrate in this performance. My goal was to express my emotions through non-verbal expression (I do not count the poem as verbal expression in this case because only a small amount of people in the hall could really understand what was it about). The feedback and talking with the audience after the concert revealed that most of them have never seen me playing with so much self-confidence on stage. Some of them also told me that I had a big presence on stage and my playing was very convincing. Others said that what I did was very impressive – both pieces – compared as how they heard from me last year.
The feedback from the audience corresponded with my self-reports that several aspects of my playing and performance improved through the intervention.
After the performance I gave a survey to the audience where they could compare both pieces. I did not explain anything about what I am researching or what I was going to perform. In the survey they had to indicate from 1 to 10 (1 being the lowest) their perception the performance of both pieces. One audience member came to me and told me that he loved the idea of this performance as one piece, first playing the traditional piece and then the improvised one. Another one thought that there was only one piece, where the second movement was written to take out the stand from the stage and perform it with electronics, dance, a reciter and body movement.
The graph below shows the survey results. The audience consisted of students of Master in the Royal Conservatory of the Hague and one teacher:
My report
My feeling on stage, on the concert of the 21st of February of 2020, was completely different from the concerts I used to perform before starting practicing improvisation and body movement. The aspects that changed included my sound, I was freer in my playing, my right arm was less tense, my breath was lower and I felt more grounded. Usually, before performing, I am very nervous and I do not want to perform, but yesterday, even though I felt anxious, I was looking forward to performing. The idea of moving on stage, and to “improvise” not only my playing, but also the reactions between the other members of the ensemble during the entire piece, made me feel very excited about performing it.
During my playing of the first piece, Capriccio for viola solo from Henry Vieuxtemps, I felt a bit anxious and my muscles a bit tense, but I could control everything I played and I managed to bring my breath down in order to feel less tense. I was concentrated on feeling harmonically the piece and expressing musically what I wanted to the audience to feel. These things were different from previous performances; the ability to be aware of my muscles and breath, control of my sound and intonation, and changing my attention from my anxiety to my expression of the piece.
The second piece – the performance of Mujer Habitada de Palabras – was the first piece in which I am improvising all the time and moving on the stage. I felt very conformable. Since I felt physically tired I had to give more attention to some of the body movements while dancing, but I felt satisfied with how that went. Moreover, my concentration was much higher during the improvised performance, as a result of not having thoughts about judging and doubting my playing. My attention was completely focused on my movement, my playing, my interaction with the other performers, and feeling what they where doing around me even without looking at them (as I explained in the workshop by Mary Oliver in 1.4 of this research). My brain was already too busy to think about my anxiety or my playing. I realized I was a bit shaky when I played the last note of the performance, because of how slowly my bow needed to move from the string in order to go down gradually until it touched the floor. I could feel the awareness and concentration of all the members on the stage during the whole performance; the concentration was very high and for this reason I also think that the communication with the audience was strong.
Looking to this graph it is easy to see that both pieces were very convincing – with the second piece slightly higher. This was in spite of the fact that the audience did not know the lyrics of the poem (as some of them told me after the performance). Afterwards when I asked them which emotions they felt, they were the same motions we wanted to express. This indicated that the performance reached its purpose: being able to express the emotions through different art expressions, in spite of the audience not knowing the words of the poem (except for two Spanish speakers in the audience).
At the end of the survey I asked the audience to write something about what moved them during the performance, so they could give more qualitative feedback. Some of the comments where:
It was super interesting how much involved movements makes the music full-filled, and also when moving the stand to the side made me being more connected to music; I was really surprised about the connection between musicians and the dancer; Another one gave me her/his impression: the first piece I could sit back and enjoy, it was a pleasure, the second I found it confronting and dramatic, I had different strong emotions even though I could not understand the lyrics of the poem and what it was really about; Another: I could enjoy a lot the calm, breath, floating and deepness of the first piece, in the second one I could notice different strong emotions such as pain, anger, rage… but at the same time, all those emotions where involved in a path, a way with sense which made me unstressed; and another: I really enjoyed it because caused a huge impact to me, and the communication between the performers was great.
