Online Roundtable B: DAY 3: Form

Online Roundtable B ended with a day focused on how dramaturgy and form can be a way for the team to move on.

PART A

Beginning the roundtable, a draft proposal of material was made:

Is there a focus-material you find interesting, that you believe we should re-visit in order to explore it further?

Any materials that could be used as a kind of performance notation eg. scripts, diagrams. I find it interesting to use this as an underlay for other dramatic material.

I think we should revisit Pepe's number and Cantata to explore more their stage and meaning possibilities

The story of jenny; i think it can function as a structure for the whole thing.

We obviously have to build further on everything we found. Also see if the idea of "overall" form would be helpful.

The Cantata (not necessarily the text, more of the concept), Richard and chorus, the circle/visit (maybe combined with the cantata), the duet of the two pictures (borders, what do you see?), door/station/walk in the woods/tuning sound, I don't know how, I wonder how the grids could be involved

Is there a focus-material or scene that you would like to enhance using your experience as a musician/choreographer/actor/etc., and try it out again with the team in September?

I'm interested in developing all of the materials we tried. I would like to be challenged more.

Pepe's number if we keep we need to work the movement

Pepes piece. Find a way to transform it into a text

As I mentioned before, the movement room is the one that makes me experience the "foreigner" feeling the most. I find this place very important for the development of this group/main theme and I would like to explore it a bit more to find a way for my self a way of approaching it. I don't say that I can make it better but if everyone finds a personal link to it, I believe things will unfold more natural."

I would like to make the Greek Chorus very well, tidy it up vocally and in expression. Also we need a bit more "focussed music" instead of only free impro.

the circle/reverse/visit combined with the concept of the cantata (organise language as music), and as a secondary option the sounds (door, walk etc), maybe more about the overall unity of the sound environment of what we do

Besides all the focus-material, and having now our theme in mind (the foreigner), is there other (new) material you believe we could explore in September?

Simultaneous news reading in multiple languages (newspaper articles). Each could bring a newspaper article about one of our chosen central themes (in Dutch, French, German, Greek, English, Romanian, Spanish etc.) and we could explore a soundscape using these. I would also like to try this using small percussion instruments to indicate punctuation in the sentences with different sounds assigned to commas, full stops, dashes etc. Everyone is on the same level because they just have words and some simple sounds to use.

Thinking of writing something small - an idea of departure

One thing the room of conducting who is doing it each time, how in relation with the foreign theme, as well as the idea that one person said in the feedback to always keep one section that is related to the latest news and has new structure each time

I will bring a Labyrinth piece (free score) that could be nice and confusing.

Maybe not new but developing the idea of the sounds. I'm not sure we need to have pre-recorded sounds, we can also create sound situations ourselves, re-enacting scenes and environments focused on their sounds (especially by using the mics) that can transform to musical events

PART B

The second half of the roundtable included a round-up discussion on form.

How does all the gathered material fit together

○ what do we miss

○ does it cover the limits of our theme

○ what other regions shall we explore

○ are we talking straight/literally or through other means

○ fiction or reality/documentary

How to start when we meet in September

Each artist proposed a form-related approach on how to continue working when the team meets again in Athens for Workshop B:

Richard 
"10 Strangers" or "1 Stranger lost 10 times" It could be a choreography, for 10 people, or 1 person, or 2 or 5 people. The lines never connect, so if there are 10 people, they each move in separate spaces from each other.

Roelof 
So I started thinking from a motion; a Wave. You can of course link it quite literally to our artistic content (like the sea), but my first reason of proposing a wave is that it presents a very nice never ending motion back and forth up and down on and on and on and on.

Bas 
Of course I did the poem yesterday, don´t know if that made sense at all. But today I thought of another option. Very classical, since I had been staring at this the entire day. But it can also be used only graphically (dot´s in space) or it can be used dynamically (loud / soft), or as movement, or even using the poetry. There´s one page missing, which makes it into a very simple A-B-A form (a little what efthimis was also proposing: you start somewhere, you go somewhere, something happens there, and you come back where you started, but different.)

Els 
The idea is to find a kind of “statistic” grid to put material in

Pepe
My idea is quite simple. I found a text about water, a text that i find inspiring and confronting at the same time. I extracted the word "water" and later on, by removing the rest of the text (except water)...

Efthimis
I thought of working on Tzeni’s text from Utrecht with the child and the grandpa
the form that we can extract from that (a very basic form i have to say compared to the above) is that of a sea travel
- something that starts from a point
- sails off to an other place
- explores that place
- and returns to the beginning 

Kieran
The idea: take 3 variables and see the correlation:
- relative change (relative change of, location, age, culture, beliefs, world view etc.) anything that makes you feel different
- time 
- "stranger amount"
By staying in a physical place for an amount of time you adjust to that place. By moving to a place where you came from initially, you need adjustment/change. You became a stranger in your own country. Time and non-movement will un-stranger you. 

Iro
I tried to combine some things:
my central island/proposition would be the rooms. The rooms that you all know and can imagine in your head...
from this island starts a travel
each travel has its own form, rhythm, choreography etc. it s the subject material of each one
all related to our subject, stranger, water etc.
the guide for the travel could be the cantata
or the story of tzeni
and, some times we could return to some "small islands", see them again or elsewhere
so, going on with the central story, but visiting and exploring and narrating (in different ways) and developing many, other short parallel stories

Thanasis
No.3 The Mandelbrot Set
It's a fractal equation. Quite simple but gives some of the famous fractals
The idea is that you repeat this equation for many many levels
depending on C (which changes everything), you end up with very different fractals.
Some need just a few steps (solving it again and again putting the new Z in the old one), some need million of times.
it would be fun to use this in making the form of a story, music, choreography etc.

George
It's not clear for me exactly how it can be used. But it has a very intuitive form and use of elements
Shapes and colours
It's an island where the stranger has passed and she was the painter
So it's the stranger's point of you
It might be a Greek island even. I have to ask my aunt
There's an Orthodox church right in the middle

Tzeni
theatron is ourselves being audience
and then i didn;t exactly like it so i found this
where again audience is us
and we can move around the spaces or even change where is the audience or the performance space
so something like this kind of combinations
we talk about trips and so where we are in space (music, dance, .... rooms) can be moved also
based on which island we are?

All material explored during Workshop A and the Online Roundtable B:

Texts

The suppliants

Cantata

Santa Muerte/Jesus Malverde

Grandpa fairytail

Ionesco

Creativity/Authenticity

Olekeboleke

Pentzikis

Quantum mechanics

Bas’ german text (?)

Swiss news

Micromegas

40 words/emotions

Visit

Photos

Border

Hug

Market - Martin Roemers

Bike

Gerhard Richter

Oculus/Facebook

Refugee life jackets / Lesvos

Jeanne d’Arc

Sounds

Pepe’s head

Birds

Door (train station)

Radio signals

Greetings (Voyager satellite)

Wood walk

Tuning strings

Trevor Wishart

Baby

Other (mixed)

Grids

Religion

George’s melody

Pepe’s numbers

Robert Ashley

Conduction

Pendulum

Reverse (Visit)

Richard+team

End of DAY 3 / End of Online Roundtable B.