justanothermusicblog

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Teleprovisation - Final Thoughts

Although this workshop was tiring for me as it was conducted back to back, almost everyday for 2 weeks, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience as well as was inspired by the eye opening perspectives that I had learnt. I feel that certain lessons can only be learnt through improvisation and unique new ideas may be born in the process as well.

Aside from my own personal experiences and takeaways, it is evident that many others also had a fruitful experience throughout this process. Even after the workshop, we are still creating our own sessions to work together and continue to stay in touch with each other. My group even created our very own group chat on the social app “Line”.

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Teleprovisation - Final Sharing

DAY 10 - After the performances, we came together for one last time, sharing our thoughts on the performances as well as the experience we had throughout this workshop. Personally the comments that were shared on the performance of group C stood out to me the most.

My first impression of the piece was my inability to determine if the start of the piece was intended or accidental. It felt confusing and messy but somehow flowed smoothly into the performance at some point. It was later confirmed by the group that it was actually a false start which they took advantage of when one of the audience members pointed that out. The audience member also added that the group was able to turn what seemed like technical difficulties in the beginning, into something new and refreshing.

Another comment that I found interesting was when one of the audience members at Zurich pointed out that the saxophone player, who performed in the same space, was playing at the room’s resonance. This caused the room to naturally vibrate and made the performance feel very “physical” at the moment, like they were in a storm which added to the chaos/build up of the performance.

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Teleprovisation - Final Performances

DAY 9 - The time has finally come to showcase our final products that we have been working on for the past few days. We first started with soundchecks for each group before we proceeded with the final performances. The main programme consisted of group B’s piece titled “Thinking Hands”, followed by group A’s “Intricacies” and lastly, group C’s “Can You Hear Me?”. Here is the link to group B’s performance which I was proud to be a part of: https://youtu.be/sKq_6MKuwdw.

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Teleprovisation - Preparation

DAY 8 - In this session, we were given the freedom on how we should spend our time, in preparation for the complete and final showcase on the next day. Any interested family, relatives and friends, were invited and encouraged to view the final performance on that day via Zoom.

During this period, many of us were working on our own group’s project, discussing second opinions or ideas with other group members and rehearsing, especially over at Zurich and Kyoto where they were physically together on Campus. We also got to know each other a little more during our breaks and even tried other random ideas and improvisations of our own.

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Teleprovisation - More Insightful Perspectives

DAY 7 - Starting off today’s session with the performance of group A. Their piece titled “Solitude”

This performance also received a number of interesting comments and details observed by the audience. Some of them that stood out to me are as listed below:

- It already feels like a polished performance.

- There is a sense of voyeurism in the piece.

- Experienced the theatre within a theatre. This is especially the case when Guila, one of the performers, interacted with the projection while another filmed her. There was the feeling of being watched and monitored.

After which we ended off the session with a last sharing of our experiences from both the perspectives of the performers and the audience members.

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Teleprovisations - Insightful Perspectives

For the main focus of today’s session, we were to showcase the work that we have done so far. Some time was given beforehand to do any last minute preparations and the order was decided to be group B, followed by group C and lastly, group A.

For our performance, we decided to have dark coloured backgrounds. The main visual element would be a focus on Yuri’s hand sculptors, accompanied by ambience music and a text spoken by another group member, named Peter. The text Peter used was based on a previous work that he did about hands. I felt that this was quite fitting for our project since it was about a similar subject matter.

Next was group C where their performance was mostly a spoken performance, based around a conversation between 2 people in a long distance relationship. Following this performance was a number of interesting comments and details observed by the audience. Some of them that stood out to me are as listed below:

- Latency due to the long distance of connectivity, added to the performance on their end.

- Eri from Kyoto who was one of the group members, was depicted in Zoom to be alone in the room with just a table and a laptop. This gave a very strong contrasting image that counterbalanced the intensity of the performance.

- An audience member pointed out that on his end, his connection started to get choppy. This affected the video and audio which added to the storytelling.

- A suggestion that an audience member pointed out was to move the camera over at Zurich’s side, closer to the performer so that the conversation feels more real.

Unfortunately, we did not have time for the performance of group A and had to move it over to the next day.

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Teleprovisation - All but a dream

DAY 6 - To start off, we were presented by one of the lecturers with a fun little game, to ease ourselves into today’s session. We were to collectively come up with one continuous story with each participant contributing at least a phrase or sentence. We took our turns and although it seemed to spiral out of control at some point, I think it had a very fitting closure in the end.

Here is the final text: When I stepped out of the black hole I saw a mirror which reflect my nose and I smell chocolate - chocolate with curry flavour - I put the chocolate in my palm and rubbed it all over my face and pour the curry into my nose and I look messy and I put sweets on my face and I thought to myself I want to eat the chocolate and I found another chocolate and I woke up and it was all a dream and found everyone in my room: dead! And there was a giant Egyptian duck what was actually a cat and Iooked at the telematic screen onto my companions and I realized it was a weird dream because I actually hate chocolate: that’s the end.

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Teleprovisation - Hands?

DAY 5 - We were put into our final groupings for the rest of the programme and were tasked to eventually come up with and refine our performances for the final showcase on the last day. I was placed into group B and we spent most of this session learning about our group members personally. We separated into our own Sonobus and Zoom rooms, relative to our groups. Together, we bounced ideas off of each other and did some improvisations. At some point, it was quite apparent that everyone was interested in these hand sculptors that a group member, named Yuri, had been using throughout the improvisation sessions that we had. Eventually, we decided to settle on a performance idea where the narrative would have something to do with the human hands.

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Teleprovisation - Thoughts on first performances

At the end of the performances, we came together and shared thoughts that we have about the experience, in the context of the situation that we were put in.

Some of my key takeaways from this session was the balance between the creator and performer. As a creator, to decide how specific the instructions should be and/or to leave some room for artistic liberty. As a performer, to decide literally on what instructions they were presented with or to leave some degree of vagueness in the interpretation.

The most fascinating part for me was the use of the medium, in this case Zoom, to its full extent. An example of this was the “accident” in the “Swag Money” performance. This taught me to make full use of the tools available to us in any creative situation, to enhance or create a performance.

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Teleprovisation - Cross Screens

The third group’s performance depicted the evolution of a chicken. It was a silly and comical performance where the narrator was describing the life cycle of a chicken. They utilised all sorts of related background images, props and made use of the active video cameras in the space, to have the performers go across multiple screens. As an audience member myself, it was quite entertaining to watch the performers screen hopping in Zoom and on my small laptop screen.

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Our group received a drawing as our instructions which we interpreted as a timeline of the whole performance. We felt that each peak represented a point of high intensity in the piece and decided to interpret the images individually based on our own disciplines. Although we did not assign a name to our piece, we treated it collectively as a sort of narrative in a dark cave. Here is the video of our final performance.

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My choice image: a photo of fake money printed on a toilet roll. Here’s before and after the mash up with a top and bottom comparison.

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Teleprovisation - Collaboration

DAY 4 - Now divided into 3 new groups, we were tasked to come up with a set of instructions for another group to perform. Instructions can be of any form (e.g images/videos/drawings/texts etc) and interpretation is up to the performing group.

For our group, Matt from LASALLE suggested we each contribute a picture of any kind and he will be mashing our choice images together to see how it turns out. We then sent it out to the other group and they came up with their performance titled “Swag Money”.

Some thoughts that were shared by the group who performed “Swag Money” were that the most difficult part of the process for them was to actually start. They mentioned that there were too many ideas around at the beginning, but everything flowed and came together naturally after they decided to stick to just one. In the video, the performers used a zoom function where with facial recognition, it would place an eyeglass over any detected faces. This included the printed faces on the bills that they used in the performance. When asked about this, the group mentioned that it was never their intention but decided to take advantage of the “accident” and carried on.

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Teleprovisation - Limitations

One of the other interesting things that we did on day 3, led by another lecturer, was an activity where we used our video cameras as a medium to create a sort of performance. Split into 2 groups, we tried to creatively come up with ways to express ourselves, through the medium of our video cameras on zoom. I think that this is one of the unique experiences made possible by the Covid situation. It was fascinating to watch interesting moments that unfolded whether it was accidental or not.

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Teleprovisation - Ear Musical

DAY 3 - We were introduced to a performance piece by a lecturer that involves making music with our ears. Because these sounds can only be perceived by the individual, it is a personalised performance that can only be performed by ourselves. The only other information provided by the performance instructions were different ways of creating unique sounds with our ears.

We spent a few minutes performing to ourselves and discussed our thoughts together afterwards. This experience taught and reminded me that every sound that we hear and can be manipulated, can become or contribute to a performance.

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Teleprovisation - Warm Up

DAY 2 - For most of this first proper session, we started out with a warm-up exercise led by a Zurich faculty member, Ben. He got us to close our eyes and started to get us to be paying more attention to the various sounds in our surroundings. For the next hour, rhetorical questions were asked and statements were made by Ben to invoke these thoughts.

At the end of it, we were to think about what had just happened and share our observations. For me I felt that the exercise mainly taught me to look at different perspectives. For example, instead of only looking out for what sounds I can pick out, I could listen out for how a certain sound interacts with another and the resulting effect.

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Teleprovisation - Latency

It was quite fascinating to me in some instances when I noticed a really long delay between Kyoto and Zurich when the 1 of the lecturers tried to communicate with the other over Zoom. It must have been at least about 10 whole seconds. Meanwhile, over on Sonobus, the latency consistently averages around under a second.

I never knew before that this could be possible with others across the world, and was expecting latency to be a huge issue during this summer school event. Thankfully, it is almost unnoticeable which was crucial in the later sessions where we had to perform together, in real time.