Gen Doy New Collaborations Bursary 2014

Lynn at the ancient Yew Tree

Well, I’ve tried four times to upload an image here and every time I try to do this I lose my text and have to start all over again! surely someone else is having problems with this software! Hey! I seem to have done it eventually. You have to write something and save it before you can add an image, it seems…..???
So, Lynn and I got to the Yew Tree and it was a lovely day and quiet quiet when we arrived. Lynn filmed inside the tree, while I went off to the rear of the churchyard and recorded a spoken text I’d written especially. I went to the rear of the little church which is really lovely and would be amazingly peaceful without the sounds of overhead planes, combine harvesters in nearby fields, traffic noise etc. However we set to work and hopefully have got some serviceable video and sound to do something with. I edited the sound files I had this morning.
At the Yew Tree, I warmed up my voice properly and tried to sing as best I could inside the tree.

Inside the Yew Tree looking upwards

However my voice felt weak and hoarse, and I was worried that I’d come all this way and practiced carefully only to deliver something sub-standard when it came to the crunch. I wondered why my voice felt so weak and creaky….I think, on reflection, that my voice is pretty quiet anyway, and I had spent an hour or so talking to Lynn on the train discussing how the editing of the Grotto piece we did before was going, and various issues Lynn wasn’t quite happy with about the editing of that piece, and we also discussed what we were going to try and do at the tree to avoid the problems we’d had during editing the Grotto material. eg. moving camera and sound that sounds static….As it turned out, we may have the same problems again….but we will discuss all this more on Friday at our next meeting. Of course you don’t know exactly what you’ve got till you go home and have a look and start to edit.
I decided at our next site visit, I wouldn’t talk very much before I did my singing at our chosen location. Lots of people don’t realise this, but everywhere we go, almost, there is sound or noise, depending on whether you welcome it or not! talking on the train means speaking over the noise of the train, announcements, other people’s conversations etc, and I find this quite tiring for my voice. Dear knows how I ever managed to be a lecturer for 35 years…or perhaps that’s why my voice weak and quiet now, as well as getting older.
Inside the tree I could also hear the combine harvester now and again! so after a few attempts at singing and recording in the tree, I went back to the rear of the churchyard and recorded my Yew Tree song there. By this time my voice really was tired, but given that the song is sung by a person who is dead, perhaps it will sound appropriate.
The Lynn suggested filming the back of my head and hair inside the tree in close-up, the patterns in the ancient wood of the tree do indeed look like tresses, and the variegated colours of my hair blended in as if in camouflage. This was a good idea, as the whole project about the Yew Tree was about how the person and the tree become linked together, and grow together – the ancient tree growing its roots through the bodies in the ground nearby. When the project is more worked on, I’ll put a sound extract in here. While I was facing the inside of the tree, I noticed initials carved inside…lovers perhaps?? the initials suggest a sense of mystery in a way that a full name would not. what’s the story behind the letters? could it be what I was referring to in my song?

initials carved inside the tree

On the way home we discussed more about what we were doing together and what might, or might not, come out of it. We felt that it would be nice to have some finished work, however short, but also the point was to develop and learn. that’s why I was rather disappointed at my singing in the tree, as I thought I’d managed to sort that. it really is different singing outside though, there’s little resonance, and the voice is “lost”, well mine is, but I thought the hollow tree interior would help. But I think not talking on a train before the performance might help next time! It will take us a while to sort out what we’ve got, but I must say I am happy with the site I chose, the wonderful presence of the tree, and the text and song I wrote, I just have to see how we can put it all together. After that, I’ll think about the next site, which I visited for the first time a week or so ago, and that is Greenham Common. This promises to be a bigger, more complex undertaking requiring plenty of research and more site visits.

Photograph by Ken Taylor

I’m hoping there’s a picture here for you to see, as I’m trying to get the hang of adding pictures in this new a-n website…..After a meeting with my collaborators and separate discussions of
my singing voice in relation to my work, I decided to have mostly recorded sound (voice and sound of waves) in my recent work for the Asylum Chapel, Peckham, South London, entitled The Ten Commandments of the Asylum Chapel. At the end, I stepped forwards towards the audience and sang for a short time. I wanted a contrast between the recorded and the live sound, between the past and the live present. The effect is very different and seemed to work well. While I was standing waiting to sing the live part, the setting sun illuminated an area around my head, a development of which I was unaware at the time. When I saw videos and still photographs of this later, I realised that this chance event should be an encouragement to me to allow my performances to be receptive to developments in the site and surroundings which could interact with my performance. Of course sometimes these really are a disruption and would wreck what I am doing, for example a fire alarm going off in the middle of a song. Other times, these chance occurrences could enhance the performance and, I suppose, are part of live art. I had realised this before, but not to the extent that a chance event could really be the highlight (literally in this case) of the performance.
The reception I got from the audience and their comments were encouraging and helpful, as were the comments from the other artists and the curator after the rehearsal. After this I decided that live performance is important to my work, and I was not going to give it up, but to decide when and where a live element would be appropriate to the work/commission very carefully. I also found it useful to present work as part of a curated programme over the course of an evening, which allowed my work to complement and/or be in dialogue with other artists’ works. In addition, I also liked the chance to work on my own away from the collaborative a-n project. It gave me a bit more of a perspective on the a-n project, which I think I was in danger of losing to a degree. I suppose the lesson of this is that it’s useful to collaborate in making work, but it’s also important to do work as an individual, which can then be in dialogue with the work of others, who also made their work as individuals. The interaction of the works can then be facilitated by the curator, so thanks to Ed Ball who curated the evening’s programme of performances at the Asylum Chapel on July 3rd.
Yesterday I worked on my performance of the song I composed to sing in the hollow Yew Tree at Crowhurst. Lucy thought the song was powerful and has given me some advice on how to make the delivery more technically sound and delivered with more emotion. The key, as always is loads of breath and support from the lower abdomen and pelvic floor, and a relaxed jaw…and don’t be afraid of pauses to allow the audience to take in what they hear and respond to it. More soon.

I’m still trying to work out how to manage this new blog set-up and have just managed to lose loads of things that I wrote after trying to add a picture…alas i’ll have to start all over again. The video of instructions for blogs on the a-n website is far too quick for someone like me, and I haven’t got a clue how to use this toolbar!
I’ve had meetings with my two collaborators about how the works are going. Lynn, who is mainly dealing with video and editing, feels that my voice is rather nervous and shaky, that I should probably be singing in the middle of my range rather than attempting to sing things that are more demanding, and also that my songs need more variety. I think that I could tackle this by warming up more thoroughly before starting to sing, and always taking pitch pipes with me to make sure I’m starting on a note that will be comfortable for the whole range of notes in the song.
I talked to my voice and singing teacher, Lucy, about this. She discussed with me what my range of voice actually is, and emphasised the need to be totally in command of the song, know the melody and the words off by heart, and warm up really well, and to attack the song with intent, not half-heartedly. Obviously being relaxed and not nervous helps as well. Lucy also said that the expectations of your audience are important. For example I am an artist who uses my speaking and singing voice in my work, and am not a professional singer. when the audience is aware of this, their expectations will adjust accordingly. Nonetheless, I need to work harder to improve and strengthen my voice and performances.
I was feeling a bit down after the meeting with Lynn, even though she made some valid points, and wondered whether I should really continue doing live performances. Did my work really need to be live? Always? Sometimes? a mixture of live and recorded sound?
I had a commission to do a new work as a result of a mini-residency at the Asylum Chapel, Peckham, South London, and decided to see what would happen there before trying to reach any tentative conclusions. Most of the performance sound was recorded and edited previously, and I sang live at the very end. I wanted a big contrast between the recorded, past sound, and the live sound which was really “in the moment” and present to the audience. This seemed to work pretty well, and I regained a lot of confidence after the evening went well. I warmed up my voice properly, and we all rehearsed for the programme before the evening performances.

I’ve tried several times to upload an image here, but have failed and so I’m going to stop here and continue once I find out how to add a photograph.