Merida June 4, 2009

Yesterday’s meeting laid out the formal structure of the project with different strategies we discussed the day previous. The performance will focus a good deal on language and it’s function as sound, as communication, as abstraction. This theme seems augmented by the challenges of working across two languages – though our meetings are in English, I wonder how difficult it is for Nadia to have to “translate” her poetics into English on the fly as it were. 

For me the challenges (but also an interesting aspect) of the project lie in this “translation” of poetics. To understand how different audiences will respond to different language and sound element. A point made was that the overlap of English and Spanish in mexico is very common and mostly associated to television and overdubbing in movies. Using this technique then requires some additional abstraction or self-awareness to divorce the initial feeling of overdub for the audience.

Another interesting development from the discussions yesterday was the idea of our doing a very text-centric project within an improvised music festival. What I had said almost offhandedly to explain our project in this context was that the mouth is the first instrument, the primary instrument. But thinking about it – it’s actually quite true. The project will focus on the mouth, speaking, communicating, sounds, and silence – and the mouth is one of the first things most people use to emit sound. The cry of a baby. I also was thinking about our use of improvisation in the performance. And what occurs to me – which may be less obvious in the project itself – but this idea of process/improvisation – is very much tied to collaboration in my mind. So the collaboration of the three of us is essentially a form of improvisation – particularly due to the fact that we’ve never worked before like this and our timeframe is short.