Gen Doy New Collaborations Bursary 2014

well the weather was kind yesterday and Lynn Dennison and I went off to the grotto to film, record and sing. we could have done with a lot more time but a kind volunteer had opened the place up especially for us for a couple of hours and we felt we couldn’t really impose on him longer. I gave him a donation to the upkeep of the grotto from the collaborative bursary funds with thanks.

One of the main ideas i put into the proposal was to experiment with the voice, sound and images, in a way that wasn’t just a video with a soundtrack. So we tried out various things in the rooms and tunnels of the grotto, which are just lovely. The tunnels which are covered with flint are better than the concreted ones, and the acoustics in the grotto are wonderful. Unfortunately i had a sore throat from singing against a load of other soundworks during a performance at the De La Warr pavillion on Saturday, so my voice not at its best. But what great atmosphere! what a presence of time, space and a special kind of air within the underground spaces!

Some of the better material we got was when i turned away from the camera, or the camera wandered over the lovely shells and various stones set into the walls of the grotto and away from me, or the camera came upon me singing as if just discovering me there. Lynn had spoken about trying this out and i thought it worked really well.

If only we’d had longer. but it was a good start to the serious of visits i’m hoping to do. On the train home we looked at the footage and i listened to the sound files last night. Despite my creaky voice we should have someting. I was sad about the state of my voice because i’d been practising the song for the grotto at home, trying to deliver the music in an 18th century style full of trills, and little runs and flourishes…..

Also yesterday i thought about the difference between an assistant and a collaborator, and how sometimes one would be required, and at other times, the other. But then there’s a bit of overlap. Surely a good assistant would also at times offer collaborative input….Lynn is great as a collaborator. She’s far more experienced than I am in all kinds of artistic media, and is much more of a perfectionist and has a very good “eye”. Also she is more bothered about intrusions of “unwanted stuff” in the material eg. nearby modern houses being visible in parts of the video of the outside of the grotto. I, on the other hand, at times don’t mind this at all, and feel it is part of the meaning of the grotto now. it stands in a small remnant of a one larger wooded park, the rest having been taken over by developers to build houses on. These houses are really close to the perimeter fence of the grotto and its greenery. To me, this is the history of the grotto and its present. Yes, we have to make things look good, but sometimes it’s more telling to include things which “unprettify” things, if you see what i mean. However we both agreed that the contemporary front door of the grotto was an eyesore!

So, my collaborations are going well, and Lynn is putting in effort way beyond the call of duty. I should have put more money in the budget to increase her fees. !

I also decided to have a meeting with Lucy, my other collaborator who is a voice coach and singer, and Lynn, at some point in the not too distant future, so they can meet and we can all discuss and review what has already been made. I’ll pay them for their time here as well. Next stop the ancient yew tree in a few weeks for some more experiments.

i’m putting off updating my website as i always hate doing that, so i’ll write a bit of blog instead. the joys of procrastination….Having visited the grotto and the yew tree, i spent the last few days writing a melody for the grotto song, which seems quite good..it’s very 18th century and i tried to do it in the style of Thomas Arne (composer of Rule Britannia as far as I recall) and Where the bee sucks) . That’s about the same period as the construction of the grotto and the poems written by the man who had it built. I just have to memorise it now.

The yew tree song…well there’s a voiceover in the first part of the video which i’ll record somewhere else, the bathroom cupboard i think, it needs to be in a quiet and muffled place, so i’ll put loads of towels on the floor. then there’s a song to be sung inside the yew tree itself on site and recorded there with all the ambient sound . It’s not exactly cheery…poisoned berries, possible suicide, rejected love etc but the main thing is for the person and the tree to become entwined, physically and mentally. I’ve been writing down the music in a very basic way using my nice yamaha E333 keyboard (a great ebay find) which displays the notes you are playing on the keyboard as you play them so’s you can write them down on a sheet of music.

I had a couple of discussions with my colaborators as well, Lucy and Lynn. It’s so useful to get another perspective on your work, especially from someone from slightly outside the area you are working in. Something i think very ordinary, seems to others to be good, and sometimes vice versa.

I’m feeling rather restless tho, wanting to get on with another level of making the work, but have to wait for access to the places and my memorisation of the material to be completed.

It’s also time i went to see some exhibitions. It’s easy to become so focussed on your own work that you end up lacking a distanced perspective that you can bring to other people’s work when you see it in a show, or a performance etc, but you’ve forgotten how to bring that critical and appraising eye to your own efforts.

I’m going to think more about the project as a whole as well, rather than working on each individual project one after the other. I need to experiment more as well i think, as that’s the main point of the bursary really.

I’m also wondering how you can put still images into this blog!

i think i’ve done it….

I decided to visit the nearest sites to London where I will be filmed singing, to record some sound and video myself and get ideas for wiriting texts, songs, and ideas for possible video shooting to discuss with Lynn.

Last Saturday I visited the grotto . It stands in wooded grounds, and was previously in a much larger piece of landscaped garden/parkland. Most of it has since been developed . It’s lovely though, shells and stones decorate the walls, and, much to my delight, the sound qualities in the rooms and tunnels under the hill are really interesting. There are also air shafts running horizontally, which mean that sounds travel around the whole of the grotto.

The volunteer stewards who look after the grotto on a daily basis were hugely helpful. The people I saw on Saturday pointed out useful things to me and were so welcoming. I took some still photographs and videos and discussed them with Lynn. We have a date to go there and film my performance in the grotto and the surroundings, weather permitting. I have composed a tune in 18th century style, and need to learn the song (with the words written by the original creater of the grotto, James Scott) before we go. Some of the sound of my singing will be in the darkness in the grotto tunnels, and some in the lit chambers.

Today I made a similar trip to the second site, an ancient yew tree in a churchyard. I was surprised to find a group of youngish men gathered around the tree full of interest. It turned out they were planning a documentary about trees, and this very tree was to feature prominently in it. My own work will be rather low-budget in comparison and with a skeleton crew! But I thought the tree was just great next to a really lovely small traditional church. Again i did some sound and video recording to discuss with my artist collaborator Lynn. At the moment, my plan is to work on a piece which will have a video of the ground in the churchyard, moving slowly over the surface of the ground and any gravestones on the ground level. there won’t be any ambient sounds/field recording during this part, but you’ll hear a voice-over recorded by me somewhere else in a soft room or slightly enclosed space as if i were speaking from somewhere else, perhaps under the ground?? then at a later point i will emerge from the tree and sing which will be recorded and filmed at the site. Since the theme of the whole suite of works in different locations is to look at the interaction of humans and nature in specific sites, in this piece I want to create something where the tree enters the person, and the person enters the tree (the tree has been hollowed out sometime in the past and a small door is fitted to one side of it. )

I sat and made notes and thought of ideas for this piece the other night remembering with sadness that it seemed much easier to compose impressive poetry whilst in love with someone who seemed to be in love with me. Now writing poetry is far more like hard work. But going to visit the site is a big help. I need to think my own thoughts, feel my own feelings and then work on that, and work on it again…..But then it helps when you have someone to discuss this with, otherwise you can fall into an over-emotional and subjective project that can mean little to anyone other than yourself. I always need to be careful of this….ask yourself, why should anyone else care about this stuff? I read the other day an interview with some actor who said he gave all his projects the Michael Fassbender test ie. ask yourself, would Michael Fassbender do this? I’m afraid I haven’t found any famous artist who will work as my “test” touchstone….just me and people who are kind enough to discuss my work with me in a supportive, intelligent way! I suppose that’s one of the best things about collaboration. I hope i’m some use to my collaborators too….

well, I’ve been doing a lot of work since the last post so i’ll just briefly go over some of the things.

I’ve had some good meetings with my collaborator and voice-coach, Lucy Legg. I highly recommend her. I started off having lessons with Lucy after we met at a symposium on starting to sing as an older person. I wanted someone to help me sing without harming my throat, and it seems that the way to do this is to use lots and lots of air, engage all the muscles of the pelvic floor to support your voice, and sing with intent! of course there’s more to it than this but i seem to be making some progress. I discussd my a-n bursary proposal with Lucy when I knew I had the award and could start working.

We are doing two things together really. still practicing excercises to improve my singing and public “utterance” voice, and also working on ways to sing and speak in public in response to different sites, and different prerecorded sounds. We had a discussion of some sound files last time…a recording of an old organ which doesn’t play very well (recorded and played by me at Carousel Sound Lab, Milton Keynes), a plane and some geese landing on a lake at the London Wetlands Centre, and a creaky gate (also Wetlands centre). I told Lucy i’d been working on listening to the sound of the organ pedals and their lovely creaky groaning sound, accompanied occasionally by a few feeble notes on the organ. But i felt that the temptation to imitate the recorded sound with my voice was very strong, and i wanted to avoid that, and try something more interesting and more unexpected. Lucy suggested just listening to the recording some more, and allowing the sounds to suggest a mood, or some words, which could then be worked on to make something with speech or singing, or abstract voice sounds which don’t have any words. I have made a start to this but have not got all that far. Somehow my problem seems to be that the recorded sounds as so interesting that i feel my own voice can add little to them, but that’s why you need someone else to listen and talk to you about what they hear. When you are doing the voice accompaniment to the recording, you can’t always tell yourself how successful or not it is. and when you record it to listen back to, all the sounds are recorded and you don’t get the “play” of the living voice against the recorded (past) sounds.

My next lesson is tomorrow.