“We simply begin by improvising,” says Helena Gaunt. Whenever they meet, in any setting, Helena Gaunt and Bart van Rosmalen simply start by playing. You cannot theorise beforehand, because there is nothing yet to theorise on. The situation in improvisation is that you know that you don’t know; there is no time and there are no criteria for deciding whether something is good or bad. You have to postpone your judgement. Bart van Rosmalen: “And you need that for the creative situation; you have to take intuitive decisions.” Exercising improvisation helps you to develop this ability of postponing the judgement. Like Miles Davis said: “Play it first , and tell what it is later.”
Archive for December, 2007
How does one exercise improvisation? Helena Gaunt and Bart van Rosmalen have developed a way of beginning they call the Stravinsky exercise: start playing using only a few notes, a single pattern, and the methods of variation. Bart van Rosmalen: “It is like meeting someone saying: ‘Hi how are you, where do you come from?’ It is musical chitchat.” The result is becoming more aware of your influence on any communicative situation. It opens up the possibilities for conversation to happen.
On September 5, 2007 Helena Gaunt and Bart van Rosmalen collaborated with painter Liselot Schut in an improvisation in image and sound. This post shows excerpts from the film that was made out of this collaboration, and Bart van Rosmalen sharing his thoughts on this kind of interdisciplinary improvisation. He noted, for example, certain similarities in the way a musician and a painter move, using a pencil, a bow , or their breath. There is also the symbolic language of the image that can inspire playing music. All in all, this kind of improvisation opens up a realm where one can express levels of emotion which are not generally accessed through everyday conversation.
Bart van Rosmalen talks about how the collaboration with Helena Gaunt has changed his perspective on improvisation. He has a lot of experience improvising: “I used to think I was a completely free player.” But then Helena introduced him to the concept of ‘sitting not knowing’: really not knowing what you’re going to do, simply sitting there and waiting for the creative act to happen. “That was a real eye-opener for me.” Freedom is not something that has a life of its own. There are always boundaries within which one can exercise freedom. The challenge is to find these boundaries and to look at what is behind them.
Helena Gaunt and Bart van Rosmalen, the initiators of the project Art in conversation, explain where the initial idea for the project came from. At a conference on music education they felt something was missing: there was a lot of talk going on about music, but music itself somehow was not there. That’s when they said: we should play together as well, instead of just talk. We should try and meet musically. And so they did.
From this initial meeting onwards they started investigating the similarities and differences between improvisation and conversation. What can we learn from improvisation that we can use in conversation? And since our conversations are increasingly between people from different disciplines (music, art, business, science, philosophy), we can also ask what art can contribute to the quest for more innovative ways of talking. Because conversation, in the end of the day, is an improvised form.
