Something I am really looking forward to in this project is visiting a place that is completely new to me and experiencing it with the perspective that what we create while we’re here will be informed by the location itself, so it will be a very pure immersion.
I have started to consider some of the guiding principles of psychogeography and how they can be applied here. Although usually in reference to urban landscape, the intention to ‘unify two different factors: the soft ambiance — light, sound, time, the association of ideas — with the hard, the actual physical constructions’ strikes me as being incredibly relevant. In Guy Debord’s 1958 ‘Theory of the Dérive’ he writes: ‘In a dérive [drift] one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there…’ Apps now exist to track a dérive/drift and I shall experiment with them and post any interesting findings! Another aspect of psychogeography is learning about a building’s back story, its uses, to get a sense of its identity and its place in its immediate surroundings. Our Porthmeor studio and cellar was once used by fishermen for storing and sorting pilchard so searching for traces of its past will be intriguing. Then from a performer’s point of view, comes the alchemy of turning what I find while drifting into my own output. There will be space -both physical, in time, and in approach, to experiment in creating textures with the material of my fellow collaborators. I will take the sounds that leap out at me and explore them on the trumpet (soft ambiance) and experiment with physical interaction (hard, physical constructions) with meaningful elements: shells, nets, wood, metal, etc. These ingredients can also be used to create graphic scores, authentic tableaux that reflect the location in a microcosm. We’ll see what drifts our way.. Gary Comments are closed.
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time-trace-place
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