Gen Doy New Collaborations Bursary 2014

I decided to visit the nearest sites to London where I will be filmed singing, to record some sound and video myself and get ideas for wiriting texts, songs, and ideas for possible video shooting to discuss with Lynn.

Last Saturday I visited the grotto . It stands in wooded grounds, and was previously in a much larger piece of landscaped garden/parkland. Most of it has since been developed . It’s lovely though, shells and stones decorate the walls, and, much to my delight, the sound qualities in the rooms and tunnels under the hill are really interesting. There are also air shafts running horizontally, which mean that sounds travel around the whole of the grotto.

The volunteer stewards who look after the grotto on a daily basis were hugely helpful. The people I saw on Saturday pointed out useful things to me and were so welcoming. I took some still photographs and videos and discussed them with Lynn. We have a date to go there and film my performance in the grotto and the surroundings, weather permitting. I have composed a tune in 18th century style, and need to learn the song (with the words written by the original creater of the grotto, James Scott) before we go. Some of the sound of my singing will be in the darkness in the grotto tunnels, and some in the lit chambers.

Today I made a similar trip to the second site, an ancient yew tree in a churchyard. I was surprised to find a group of youngish men gathered around the tree full of interest. It turned out they were planning a documentary about trees, and this very tree was to feature prominently in it. My own work will be rather low-budget in comparison and with a skeleton crew! But I thought the tree was just great next to a really lovely small traditional church. Again i did some sound and video recording to discuss with my artist collaborator Lynn. At the moment, my plan is to work on a piece which will have a video of the ground in the churchyard, moving slowly over the surface of the ground and any gravestones on the ground level. there won’t be any ambient sounds/field recording during this part, but you’ll hear a voice-over recorded by me somewhere else in a soft room or slightly enclosed space as if i were speaking from somewhere else, perhaps under the ground?? then at a later point i will emerge from the tree and sing which will be recorded and filmed at the site. Since the theme of the whole suite of works in different locations is to look at the interaction of humans and nature in specific sites, in this piece I want to create something where the tree enters the person, and the person enters the tree (the tree has been hollowed out sometime in the past and a small door is fitted to one side of it. )

I sat and made notes and thought of ideas for this piece the other night remembering with sadness that it seemed much easier to compose impressive poetry whilst in love with someone who seemed to be in love with me. Now writing poetry is far more like hard work. But going to visit the site is a big help. I need to think my own thoughts, feel my own feelings and then work on that, and work on it again…..But then it helps when you have someone to discuss this with, otherwise you can fall into an over-emotional and subjective project that can mean little to anyone other than yourself. I always need to be careful of this….ask yourself, why should anyone else care about this stuff? I read the other day an interview with some actor who said he gave all his projects the Michael Fassbender test ie. ask yourself, would Michael Fassbender do this? I’m afraid I haven’t found any famous artist who will work as my “test” touchstone….just me and people who are kind enough to discuss my work with me in a supportive, intelligent way! I suppose that’s one of the best things about collaboration. I hope i’m some use to my collaborators too….

well, I’ve been doing a lot of work since the last post so i’ll just briefly go over some of the things.

I’ve had some good meetings with my collaborator and voice-coach, Lucy Legg. I highly recommend her. I started off having lessons with Lucy after we met at a symposium on starting to sing as an older person. I wanted someone to help me sing without harming my throat, and it seems that the way to do this is to use lots and lots of air, engage all the muscles of the pelvic floor to support your voice, and sing with intent! of course there’s more to it than this but i seem to be making some progress. I discussd my a-n bursary proposal with Lucy when I knew I had the award and could start working.

We are doing two things together really. still practicing excercises to improve my singing and public “utterance” voice, and also working on ways to sing and speak in public in response to different sites, and different prerecorded sounds. We had a discussion of some sound files last time…a recording of an old organ which doesn’t play very well (recorded and played by me at Carousel Sound Lab, Milton Keynes), a plane and some geese landing on a lake at the London Wetlands Centre, and a creaky gate (also Wetlands centre). I told Lucy i’d been working on listening to the sound of the organ pedals and their lovely creaky groaning sound, accompanied occasionally by a few feeble notes on the organ. But i felt that the temptation to imitate the recorded sound with my voice was very strong, and i wanted to avoid that, and try something more interesting and more unexpected. Lucy suggested just listening to the recording some more, and allowing the sounds to suggest a mood, or some words, which could then be worked on to make something with speech or singing, or abstract voice sounds which don’t have any words. I have made a start to this but have not got all that far. Somehow my problem seems to be that the recorded sounds as so interesting that i feel my own voice can add little to them, but that’s why you need someone else to listen and talk to you about what they hear. When you are doing the voice accompaniment to the recording, you can’t always tell yourself how successful or not it is. and when you record it to listen back to, all the sounds are recorded and you don’t get the “play” of the living voice against the recorded (past) sounds.

My next lesson is tomorrow.

I’ve decided to work outwards from my base in London and visit the nearest sites first. These are a historic tree which you can enter through a small door built into the tree, and a grotto built by a Quaker in the eighteenth century. In this way, if i have to go back to the sites with my film collaborator and film and record again, it will be easier to do this than start with the less accessible sites. We’ll have learnt more by the time we get to the sites in Norfolk and Suffolk.

I’ve already had several discussions with Lynn Dennison, who is working with me on this project. We’ve been talking about the themes and issues linking the various sites I selected to perform in and resppond to, and how we might do this. One of the main themes is the way that humans influence and interact with natural sites, making them more or less “natural” and why this is not static but evolving. For example in another of the chosen sites, Greenham Common, nature and plant life have re-colonised (if that’s the right word) areas where struggles related to war, violence and gender occurred.

In the historic tree, the interior was carved out and apparently made big enough for a meeting place….why?and at the grotto, an artificial addition to nature incorporated “dead” nature in the form of shells. The porch of the grotto was actually being demolished some years ago when a preservation order was served, and the porch restored. so layers of human invervention, both creative and destructive, resonate at this site.

I also discovered (through Wikipedia, that i always told my students not to cite as a source, although sometimes it’s a useful starting point) that the person who built the grotto was a poet and a writer on poverty in the 18th century. I’ve ordered a book of his poems online, and am thinking of singing some of his writing at the site, either stationary or wandering around…..why stationary? why wandering around? Lynn and I need to experiment and think why one and not the other? or a mixture of both? Another issues i’ve been thinking about is how to have the speaking or singing voice present alongside a film or projected image without it sounding like a soundtrack. And if the voice part is performed live, should its source be seen or not? this also has to do with the intervention/non-intervention in the landscape/natural location I feel. …an unseen intervention but a heard intervention?

Also I’ve been contacting people to allow us access to the sites where this is necessary. No reply from the National Trust at Orford Ness as yet.

I haven’t yet started by collaborative bursary projects but I thought I would start the blog because, in a way, the project started when i wrote the application and formulated ideas, and set them out along with the budget.

Applications…success? failure?

I was excited and happy to be awarded a bursary. So many times we as artists apply for things, and it’s a disheartening process when lots of applications fail, or, more often, are never even acknowledged by the receiving organisations or individuals. It’s good in some ways to write applications, even if unsuccessful, because you are always thinking of new ideas, problems to do with your work that need addressing, the cost of things, can you do this on your own or do you need someone to work on it with you etc etc. However on the other hand rejection and being ignored can be disappointing, especially if you think you have a good project which deserves support! Also after spending days writing an application/proposal you can feel that you have actually done the work but of course you haven’t. There is nothing to show for your efforts and nothing to put on your website or to exhibit.

But sometimes weeks later you look at the proposal again, perhaps with a view to using some of it in another context, and you see areas of weakness in it. Or you realise it was perfectly good and you should try again. You learn from writing down your ideas and presenting them for scrutiny to tohers, but you also need to learn by making the work and trying to install it in different ways. There’s a limit to what you will learn from just writing! But writing helps me think. I learn from reading and writing as well as making, or perhaps i should say that for me, reading and writing is part of the making, as is investigating locations and visiting them to “feel” and hear them, and researching their history .

My collaborative bursary project

I’ll copy and paste some of my application in here to give you an idea of what I’ll be investigating with collaborators over a period of a few months this summer and early autumn.

I want to undertake this collaboration to investigate the relationship of my voice, and vocal sounds, to different landscape sites. I work with sound, my voice, and field recordings in installations, and want to collaborate with a professional singer and a video artist. I’ll explore the relationship of the body to landscape space and significance using sound and the voice. I became interested in this through hearing Schubert’s Winterreise song-cycle performed. A singer wanders through an emotional winterlandscape, his songs conveying his emotions and loosely linked narratives. I want to explore with the professional singer and video artist ways in which my voice can explore responses to spaces and places with song, words and also what is in the voice which goes beyond words.

How will my voice relate to natural sounds in the landscape? Water, trees, birds, animals etc. What are various acoustic spaces in different sorts of landscape? I want to visit sites which offer different possibilities of collaborative response, both in terms of the voice, and in terms of imaging the site-specific performance through moving images. How can the imagery go beyond the picturesque and the rustic, and offer something more challenging, as may the vocal interventions?

I want to work with the professional singer in her studio in London, preparing for visits which follow with the visual artist. I have selected sites of natural, historical and political significance. (The names of the sites have been ommitted here until I do the work).

These are natural, but also cultural sites. The collaboration will allow me to develop more ambitious work than I can do as an artist working alone, benefit from advice and fresh ideas, explore in more depth the relationship of sound and image, undertake performative responses to sites of different acoustic, natural and historical significance, and explore how the artistic investigations “in the field” can be best presented to art audiences/gallery visitors.

So far, I’ve been trying to arrange a visit to Orford Ness but have had no reply so next week I will phone again and sent another email to the wardens there. I hope it can be arranged successfully! I visited Orford Ness last year. what an amazing place. How could an artist fail to make interesting work there??? I’ll find out!