What is multidisciplinary communication between a dancer and a violin and how do you communicate non-verbally in the moment? Check out the video and read our reflections below!
Viktoria Grynenko (violinist) & Janita Frantsi (dancer)
As our process concluded, we further explored the idea of instant communication and artistic dialogue, where both artists create together and respond to each other in the moment. We started with “call and response” where we moved/played one at a time and then utilized the exercises we had done in our process as tools to create more seamless dialogue.
Janita:
Our dialogue became more organic and connected as time passed and we worked together. I felt more trust and connection between us, and we were, for example, able to find endings to our improvisations more collectively. We also found more common ground between our artistic disciplines. Based on these discoveries, we set cues to communicate non-verbally during the piece. For example, we used more disjointed sounds and movements to indicate uncertainty and tension in the beginning of the piece, and then progressed to major key melodies and cleaner, more expansive movements to indicate a more hopeful ending.
I particularly enjoyed the moments when I wasn’t always sure who was following and who was leading, but we reacted to each other more quickly in the moment. There were moments when I planned to continue with a specific movement or spatial pathway but then changed my mind last minute because of what Viktoria played. Sometimes, these changes were intuitive in the moment and made more sense when watching the recording afterwards. This reminds me of the importance of listening and being present in improvisation. It also reminds me how improvisation is a skill to practice, but collaborative improvisation can also grow from resting, reflecting, and letting things settle before working on them again.
So far, while having a structure to follow, we have kept our piece improvisational. It would be intriguing to use this process and these exercises to build a set musical and movement composition and to explore how to keep the responsiveness and adaptability while working with set material.
Viktoria:
As we worked on dialogue exercises, our skills improved. Some of the ways the dialogue took place was contrasting, mimicking, or continuing what the other participant “said”. In music, I imitated the speech intonation: the contour of the melody going up for a question and going down for the answer. I also played more dissonant passages in a place of question and straightforward melodies as an answer. Overall,I tried to follow the intonation of the speech in this exercise. Sometimes I had my own vague image of a story that I would carry over in a dialogue, like telling a story through music and imagine that the dancer asks questions about it. Similarly, I would get carried away by an idea of a dancer and through music “ask” more about it.
This exercise is a combination of many others. For me the important part was not to lead all the time but to somehow keep the accounting and to be fair in the amount of leading and following. The good feeling from this exercise was when I was following the flow of inspiration, then I would tune into the dancer and follow her for a while until I had what felt like a perfect idea, and then I would lead with my own idea again. Sometimes there was no flow and we would feed off each other's ideas, just short moments, until a bigger idea would take over. It felt like it was a common structure built from music and dance.
Thanks for following us along as we shared our process!
Find us on social media:
Viktoria Grynenko (violinist), instagram.com/missgryn/?h...
Janita Frantsi (dancer), instagram.com/janitafr/?h...
This project is supported by the Edmonton Arts Council and the City of Edmonton.
Негізгі бет The Interplay Between a Dancer and a Violin: Artistic Dialogue (pt. 5)
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