Keeping Time

STOP. That went wrong. Musica Practica was on Sunday 11th, I failed to click ‘publish’ until just now. Inept.

Hello! Quick announcement about a performance of my work happening in Oxford today.

Musica Practica is back. This time round, conductor Anthony Weeden will perform the work in the Sheldonian quad of the Bodleian Library, Oxford from 1:30-4:30pm. The event concludes my artist writer residency at Modern Art Oxford. From the MAO website:

A lone orchestra conductor performs in public, translating the sounds and everyday movements surrounding him into real-time orchestral choreography. Conflating instruction and response, conductor and audience simultaneously direct one another’s actions. Artist and writer Tamarin Norwood identifies a single thread of enquiry running through John Gerrard’sLegacy Fellowship commission and its associated programme: the translation of physical movements into choreographed instructions. Performed by Anthony Weeden.

The event is free to attend, just stop by any time. The performance takes place every half hour from 1:30-4:30pm. Each performance lasts twenty minutes followed by a ten-minute break.

The instructions will likely be complicated, perhaps with a time-code or a stave running along the foot of the page, and a key to decipher the symbols. I think it will be a book you have to rehearse a few times and finally perform when you’ve got it right.

This morning I’ve done something quite simple and anthropomorphic, which isn’t exactly what I had in mind but it’s a useful experiment. The circles are where you plant your fingertips. You walk your hand over the page and hesitate at the edge, turning the page like a precipice. The thumb comes in to steady the operation at the last minute, then the fingertips plunge down into the next page. The second picture is where they land, with the thumb still in place on the page before. The circles would need annotating before they made any sense to a reader: this is where the key or the time-code would come in.

But really I want the hands operating on their own, doing the kind of things hands do anyway, and using the paper as a guide to movement rather than as a stage. I would prefer them to be working in the air around the book rather than against a flat surface, and I want to use the malleability of the pages to allow for this.

So far I’m working with 110gsm paper but I’ll have a go with some thinner paper too, to permit bends and folds in many directions at once. It might be good to bind several papers together – different papers for different movements. I have a stack of A2 papers on my desk at the moment, the corner of each marked with a different weight in the pencil of the binder I met in January.

Now then. Today the Modern Art Oxford publication.

My brief is to create something on paper that follows on from the video work I made for ‘Keeping Time’. I’ve decided I want to take forward the relationship between the making process and the resulting product, and to do this I’ve been looking at folds. Not Deleuze, just paper.

The original plan was for a run of about 2,500 folded A2 pamphlets you could pick up for free at the gallery. Back in January I visited an excellent printer/bindery who showed me their machines for trimming paper and making multiple folds, and also talked with them about options for bespoke folds created from a metal die created for the purpose.

Incorporating pleats and cuts and irregular page sizes increases the production cost, so we’re now thinking about a smaller print run of 250 limited edition books available for purchase rather than for free. I like the idea of having a more substantial object at the end of the process – I always worry pamphlet-type things get thrown away.

One of two initial ideas is pictured here, designed for the original single-sheet pamphlet idea. This is where I’m beginning. The sketch pictured is a blank sheet with a simple folding pattern drawn over some trial folds. The one I haven’t pictured is a page screwed up into a ball, unscrewed, with all the resulting creases marked over in pen. I haven’t finished it because of how long it takes to draw dotted lines over every crease you get when you screw up a page into a ball. If I were going ahead with that idea I certainly would draw over each and every crease – the more the better – but drawing all those lines just for a trial gave me the distinct feeling I was using it to procrastinate from doing other things. I haven’t included the picture of the half-finished one here, not least because all the flattened down folds look like an overemotional aerial picture of a mountain range.

With these trials I started to think of ways for the publication to work as a set of folding instructions for the reader, so that by handling the book your hands create certain physical gestures. The physical gestures you make in the air around/with the pages are the important thing, rather than any diagrams or instructions that appear on the page in order to make those gestures happen. I’ve been wondering whether BSL might be a possibility – some fingerspelled words or signs making an announcement of some kind – though the work so far has not incorporated BSL and I don’t want to bring in another language arbitrarily. It would be nice if the gestures were something anyone could understand without specialized knowledge.

… so I’m still thinking about the matter. The matter always comes last. While I’m thinking I’m going to have a go at some folding, and see how one might create visual instructions for gestures as precise as fingerspelling. One thing at a time.

Phew. Sorry I vanished. I’ve been working to another deadline which pushed everything else out of the way.

The MAO exhibition is taken down now – photos soon! – and now I’m turning my mind to the associated publication. It’s in the early stages so far, but I’m going to post some images of my initial ideas tomorrow.

In the meantime here’s a sketch I scribbled while I was planning some schools workshops for with the MAO residency, incorporating BSL fingerspelling and person-sized alphabets. I ran two workshops at a local school last Monday, with another two this coming Monday. GOODNESS ME back-to-back workshops with thirty nine-year-olds are tiring.

Lastly, I’m quite thrilled to be welcoming orchestra conductor Anthony Weeden to Oxford on Sunday where he’ll be performing my performance piece ‘Musica Practica’. He’s quite brilliant. He last performed the piece at Tate Britain last year, and before that at SE8 Gallery in London and outdoors on the Southbank, but this is its first appearance in Oxford. After the workshop on Monday I described the performance to the children, and one or two asked if they could bring their recorders and play a song so Anthony could conduct it. I told them yes, emphatically. I would love it if they came along. People can just turn up and wander past, or stop and stare, or, frankly, bring their recorders along for a song.

Here’s an outline from the MAO website – do join us!

A lone orchestra conductor performs in public, translating the sounds and everyday movements surrounding him into real-time orchestral choreography. Conflating instruction and response, conductor and audience simultaneously direct one another’s actions.

11.03.2012 at 1:30 PM – 4:30 PM

Performance Location: Oxford City Centre, outside Sheldonian Theatre, off Broad Street.

More here:

http://www.modernartoxford.org.uk/whats-on/musica-practica/about/