Dances with Jirí Kylián

Dances with Jiří Kylián

This year I'm taking time for more retrospection on periods of enormous creativity, for example in the nineteen-eighties, when I was not only painting landscapes in Burgundy near Chablis, but portraits, musical subjects and more than anything else, dance. 

I had discovered Jiří Kylián, the amazing choreographer from Prague who would redefine modern ballet for me and perhaps for the world. In the late 1970's he began to create one masterpiece after another for the Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague, works that were soon touring internationally.  I became a regular presence in their dance studios, sketching like a man possessed, as I witnessed his choreographies taking shape. I wonder whether Jirí will ever know what an influence he had on my work in that period and how much I loved watching him and his dancers. His musicality and the imaginative ways with which he could give profound personal expression to dance (often reflecting his cultural roots) remain a great inspiration - to this day.           

Photoshoot with Jirí after the hanging of my mural for the Nederlands Dance Theater (1987)

Jiri's Overgrown Path to the solo piano music of Janáček, expressing both agonizing loss and fond memories (those of Janaček and Jirí, I believe), inspired a series of watercolours. As the haunting tones of the piano float in space, dancers meet, embrace, take their leave and part for ever.

Overgrown Path I (Kylián/Janaček), watercolour 70 x 50cm, 1980

Overgrown Path ll, (Kylián/Janaček), watercolour, 1985/7.

Jirí's Sinfonietta (1978) was perhaps the masterpiece that took the world by storm. Janáček's exuberant fanfare - a celebration of Czechoslovakia - was danced with astonishing brilliance by the Netherlands Dance Theater, as they leaped across that eighteen-metre stage (to get that thrill, watch the video here). The leaps, the gestures to the skies, are there in my watercolour, but instead of the decor of subtle greens and greys, my exhilaration at the sounds of those wind instruments compelled me to choose the warm colours you see below.

Sinfonietta (Kylián/Janáček), watercolour and oil pastel, 1986/87.

Actually, many of my finished watercolours were developed sometime after the rough sketches I made in the theatre. I needed time to "choreograph" my gestures in the empty space of my paper, as explained in my blog The beauty of space and silence. I was gradually worked towards two separate one-man shows in The Hague in 1987 and 1989. I look back with fond nostalgia to that era with Jirí and his dancers, when every day I left their studios walking on air, a would-be dancer whose technique happened to be painting. Perhaps the highlight was a modern ballet Invention for NDT in 1989 (co-created with Philip Taylor), when my kinetic painting flooded the dancers with colours as they danced across my huge white decors. But that's another story, that I posted here.

Meditating

Meditating on the audio-visual creative process. 

Between 1966 and 1973 I taught art at Aiglon College - a remarkable international school in the Swiss Alps founded by John Corlette. It was a boys' school only in those days and this visionary personality believed in educating "the whole man" - the physical, spiritual, social and intellectual.. And he assembled a somewhat eccentric but brilliantly qualified staff to put his philosophy into practice. 

Try covering each side of JC's face, to see what an enigma this man was.

In addition to the usual syllabus, JC believed in fresh air, healthy food, music - and silence. Every morning the whole school assembled for a Meditation (several minutes silence after the "pearl of wisdom" delivered by one of the staff), before they plunged into a very demanding day. On Saturdays, rather than the spoken word, a short piece of music was played, followed, as always, by the silence. On occasion, I would draw a story sequence on an overhead projector. As they followed my pen-lines the silent curiosity of 350 boys was palpable - they found it easy to focus on the developing visuals. Then I thought, why not something audio-visual? Live visuals, music and poetry to create a miniature Gesamtkunstform? An enthusiastic music teacher and a literature teacher* were up for a few minutes semi-improvisation - and so, just over forty years ago in the quiet Swiss mountains, my art form of live kinetic painting to music was born. 

View of the Dents du Midi, from Aiglon College.

Remarkably, at the very same time in New York, the light artist Joshua White and company were also using overhead projectors (and other analogue technical equipment) to explore psychedelia and to improvise other mind-blowing experiences with the music of Frank Zappa, Janis Joplin and the Mothers of Invention. These fluid light shows were spectacular creative forerunners of the now standard digital visual projections backing most performances of pop music. 

In contrast to these excessive assaults on the senses, my interest was in "less is more" - dramatically slowing down my live kinetic visuals to a therapeutic tempo that takes you "out of this world" towards a meditative state of being focussed in "the Now". And my preference was towards contemporary "classical" music. But despite the film "Esquisses" made by Télévision Suisse Romande in 1976, based on my admittedly still quite experimental ideas, not many people noticed. 

"Prayer" -  the final image from Hosokawa's Meditation for victims of the Tsunami.

Classical music was slow to learn from the the world of pop music how hypnotic an audio-visual performance can be. (I wrote about the development of my Concerts of kinetic watercolour in an earlier blog in 2012). Although recently concerts are occasionally accompanied by digital visuals, more often than not these detract from the music. What is often lacking is the audio-visual sensibility amongst artists to create a Gesamtkunstform with the essential synergy that evolves from an inner creative feeling for visual harmony, or counterpoint. My experience is that audiences young and old love the surprise, the sensation of being there at such a live visual creative process. But it's sad that many concert-programmers find this difficult to understand and are missing the opportunity to capture new audiences in this way.
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* Musician Clive Fairbairn, literature teacher Norman Humphrys and (later) musician Emile Ellberger.









  

The magical time of our singing

The magical time of our singing

In 2004 my wife and I strayed from the tourist route for monastery visits on the Greek island of Lesbos and chanced upon this tiny derelict Greek-Orthodox chapel. 

We could easily get inside, where there was nothing much left to be seen. Yet the acoustic of the empty building was extraordinary. Even a whisper sounded special. Curious, I stood under the centre of the dome and just droned a few tones as I looked up. Every sound, floating up into the hollow space, was magical! Very soon the two of us were improvising some rough harmonies, marvelling at how good we sounded and suddenly feeling that we might have somehow keyed into a vibe that was hundreds of years old. When we emerged after ten minutes or so there was a little group of tourists listening outside. They thought it was a concert! Ah yes, the joyful illusions of the "singing in the shower" phenomenon! The architecture did it all for us.

But seriously, what is it about the acoustics of a dome on a cube, possibly joined at the golden 5:8 proportion, that create such a full, rich sound and take us into other spheres?

Here's the watercolour I made to commemorate this intensely personal experience. I called it "The time of our singing" (with apologies to Richard Powers, the author of that brilliant novel). As my musical instrument is actually the paint-brush, this may look better than it sounded!

"The time of our singing", watercolour, 50 x 36cm. 2004.

The Curse of concert coughing

The Curse of concert coughing

Cough, cough, cough! Right in the middle of the quietest, most ethereal part of the music. The coughing season is with us again!

Last night, as Andris Nelsons conducted a brilliant performance of Britten's Les Illuminations with Ian Bostridge and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, after each of the eight sections, the coughing erupted. The concert was being recorded for television, so Andris had to wait patiently each time until the storm of coughing, then the giggles at the coughing, had subsided. But after the ninth and final section he got his own back. He and Ian Bostridge held the silence for minutes......... so unbelievably long that one might have suspected that he was frozen, unable to move. You could have heard a pin drop, possibly because people thought there was something wrong. He was letting 2200 people know that yes, there had been something wrong, and this is how it might have been! When and how will people ever learn?

Recently, During the whole first half of my performance of kinetic painting Cloud & Light with Toshio Hosokawa, a young woman sitting in the front row, immediately behind me, coughed loudly without stopping. 

Last minute preparations for my performance of Cloud & Light, just behind the conductor.

Toshio Hosokawa uses a Buddhist concept to describe his music, as "a tone that comes from silence, it lives, it returns to silence". Well, forget it. How he (and I) kept going I don't know. I wanted to shout out "Hey, listen to the paintbrush!" This was not only a savage attack on our concentration, but a lack of awareness of the purpose of the occasion, as the rest of the audience tried to appreciate music and the silence. 

Japanese audiences of course, just don't cough. It's unthinkable - part of an inbuilt social awareness. And have you noticed that the musicians never cough? Even if they have tears streaming down their cheeks as they play. How do they do it? In this case, a friend of mine went up to the young lady at the interval and said: "You are sick. You must go home, now". She said she would think about it, but he was so insistent that fortunately she took his advice. 

What can be done about this curse? Free cough sweets at the entrance? A pre-concert announcement like "Please turn off your phone. No photography and no coughing allowed"? Mindfulness training? Any ideas?