Once upon a time, in a land far far away, there was a land which, once a year, held a glorious festival. All members of the kingdom came together for two weeks of the year, abandoning their usual pursuits, and threw themselves into brand new activities with people whom they hardly knew. Together they created great works of performance art by embracing their differences and throwing off the expectations. Sounds pretty idyllic huh? Well, here at Trinity Laban, that's kinda what we do. It's CoLab times again and we lovely folks on both sides of creek (Deptford creek this is) come together for a fun filled and action packed fortnight of activity.
This year I lucked out. I get to participate in the baroque meets contemporary dance project which will culminate in a performance in the Finale! I've just got back from day one and we've all been getting into the swing of things. Today we started with a session from Peter Knapp, our music mentor for the week, before getting right into the meat of the work.
The main aim of the day was to give everyone a rough idea of the repertoire. Whether this be for musicians seeing the arrangements for the first time or dancers hearing them for the first time. The orchestration we are using is not a "traditional" baroque orchestra and as such all the music had to be re-scored for the instruments available. Also, the time limitations required a number of cuts for us to be able to cover the broad range of repertoire.
We worked our way through all the pieces with the dancers making some recordings and talking through ideas for choreography. We then covered the chorus pieces (the chorus had spent some time in another room working with Peter, who is a baroque specialist). Throughout the process some of us were making notes on bits and pieces to focus on tomorrow in rehearsals as we start to dig into things a little deeper.
Overall it was a very productive and fun day. There are already a lot of promising ideas and I am really looking forward to the rest of the week.
P.s This is the sort of thing we're aiming for. I found it while buzzing around the interwebs :)
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