Speed Dating
This the post where you can get exclusive access to early works-in-the-making!
A major part of our plan as the creative team was to get people making - fast - the goal being to learn more about each other, to start the process of collaboration, and see where individual's affinities and tastes lay. With this knowledge, we would be better equipped to figure out who might work well together, who needed to be challenged or oriented in a new direction etc. So on the first and second days, we put people together in pairs with the task of using the inspiration from our walks, our reflections, and exercises, to create new pieces in a short period of time - usually about one hour. We called this "speed dating".
Often the process of creating under such a tight deadline means finding a topic, an idea, something to focus on, and then seeking to translate that concept into music, art, and performance. With no extra time, there is little concern about perfection or quality, merely the importance of saying yes! Let's do it! This means there can often be a degree of improvisation involved, or roughness around the edges of the sound design or photo editing etc., but often if the seed of the concept is strong enough, and followed through with, then the piece will have aspects that work. At this stage, the point isn't judgement, it's exploration, a search for a core skill or idea that could be taken further.
Included below are some pieces that were not developed further - which is by no means a statement on their quality. Rather, other pieces may have been stronger, or the creative team wanted to challenge an artist to pursue something deeper in their practice. Or maybe the artist found another way to explore their concept that they preferred. In all instances, these short collaborations served well to start the creative juices flowing and to help the artists find collaborators and ideas they wanted to focus on.
Some works that didn't go forward in development:
A major part of our plan as the creative team was to get people making - fast - the goal being to learn more about each other, to start the process of collaboration, and see where individual's affinities and tastes lay. With this knowledge, we would be better equipped to figure out who might work well together, who needed to be challenged or oriented in a new direction etc. So on the first and second days, we put people together in pairs with the task of using the inspiration from our walks, our reflections, and exercises, to create new pieces in a short period of time - usually about one hour. We called this "speed dating".
Often the process of creating under such a tight deadline means finding a topic, an idea, something to focus on, and then seeking to translate that concept into music, art, and performance. With no extra time, there is little concern about perfection or quality, merely the importance of saying yes! Let's do it! This means there can often be a degree of improvisation involved, or roughness around the edges of the sound design or photo editing etc., but often if the seed of the concept is strong enough, and followed through with, then the piece will have aspects that work. At this stage, the point isn't judgement, it's exploration, a search for a core skill or idea that could be taken further.
Included below are some pieces that were not developed further - which is by no means a statement on their quality. Rather, other pieces may have been stronger, or the creative team wanted to challenge an artist to pursue something deeper in their practice. Or maybe the artist found another way to explore their concept that they preferred. In all instances, these short collaborations served well to start the creative juices flowing and to help the artists find collaborators and ideas they wanted to focus on.
Some works that didn't go forward in development:
In a few cases, we did take forward some of the pieces that came out of the speed dating. As you will be able to hear below, Francis and Jason made a very clearly structured and well played piece in response to the walk in the Burnt Forest. We loved their combination so much that we commissioned them to do some more writing on it, and while they added another section and tweaked some parts, the final result is not far from this early version.
Meanwhile, Henrique and Janna also created a piece in response to the walk to the cave. It had a clearly structured narrative, and a compelling improvisational composition. However, while their music remained much the same, the piece really transformed and found its footing once we visited the paper factory on our day off. Working as a team, Henrique and Janna created their own visuals by filming in the factory, and eventually performing live while the video played. It was a great instance of how a piece can develop from one seed and then become about something entirely different.
Some works that were later developed further and performed in the final sharing:
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