Commemorating tragedy through dance

Commemorating tragedy through dance

As the world commemorates 1914 and the first World War, I think back to Jirí Kylián's modern ballet Soldiers' Mass (Field Mass), created in 1980 for the Netherlands Dance Theater and still painfully relevant. Described by a critic as "a poignant commentary on the devastation, absurdity and futility of war", it was in fact a deeply-felt protest. 

The music was composed in 1939 by Jirí's compatriot Bohuslav Martinu, to a text by Jirí Mucha, after Germany had invaded Czechoslovakia and World War ll was escalating rapidly. It was written in memory of a battalion of young Czechoslovak soldiers who were all killed the day after they went into battle in France in World War I. What makes this work even more personal is that in 1968 Jirí was exiled from his homeland Czechoslovakia, due to the communist invasion. 

As I made sketches during the creation of this beautiful tragic work, it made a terribly deep impression on me, as a pacifist. Twelve beautiful young men on stage were "standing in" for their fellow men from any country you care to mention, who were drafted or volunteered to unite in fear, senseless obedience and death, acting out what we call the "theatre of war".  A baritone and chorus sing the Mass and at a certain moment the dancers join in, singing a Mass for their own death. Crying out against the inhumanity of man. One long sinister dull red stripe on the horizon repeatedly emerges and disappears in the deep blue night. Click here for a montage from the ballet then press Play.

Gerald Tibbs, Leigh Matthews, Glen Eddy. Photography: Jorge Fatauros

(acknowledgement to Jirí Kylián and the Netherlands Dance Theater).

Soldiers' Mass l (Kylián/Martinu) watercolour and oil pastel, 50 x 70cm.

To occasionally give harsh accents (tracer bullets?), to this watercolour, I use oil pastels here and there. They resist or cut through the subtle effects of the watercolour. This device for intense colour provided a lot of expressive potential in most of my dance works in the nineteen-eighties. There are more to come.

Soldiers' Mass ll (Kylián/Martinu)

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.