Back again! I’m finding having this blog a really useful way to structure some of my thoughts in the madness of the Joy Orchestra project.
This week I started an intensive week of filming at the Welsh college of Music and Drama. There is some scary talent in that place: today I filmed four handed piano playing at break neck speed and met a lady who is making an instrument out of feedback.
The more I chat to people the more I keep coming back to language. I’d intended to make this project completly outside of language, just use sound and gesture in my films. But some of the stories I’m hearing are so profound – tales of the musicians ‘first’ instrument, the way an orchestra is like one animal responding almost telepathically to change – that I’m wondering where these stories can be heard?
I guess that’s one of the delights of conducting “research” as opposed to a “project” – I’m allowed to change.
No amount of shrinkwrapped sad croissant could make up for the five gruelling hours it took to get to London on the Megabus Gold today! Still I arrived excited to visit Lux and dig in their artists moving image archives.
They’re a nice bunch that Lux lot and soon I was sitting with a cuppa in a great screening room. I’ll be visiting Lux five times over the period of my project. I’m hoping that looking at the ways other artists use video will enrich my practise. It’s proved really inspiring so far.
Laura Prouvost is someone I’ve heard lots about but Ive never seen her work in the flesh. And what a delight. I saw Stong Sory 6 in which we meet a ‘cake’ that she sings too and Monolog: an intimate dialogue that blurs audience and screen. Beatrice Gibson’s A Necessary Music also gave me lots of food for thought.
Here are a few of the notes I scribbled down as I watched the works…
Subtitles are like another voice, they can battle with, contradict or complement spoken words…
Fiction is permitted!
Let people ‘arrive’ at the film…suspense, wonder and questioning are a good place to start …
I am allowed to be in my films..any version of me that is useful…
