No embedded player? Try here.
Time: Sunday 1st September 2013 at 11.00am
Weather/light bright, overcast.
Photographers/artists: photos by Neil Sloman audio recording by Nathan Thomas and myself, video footage by Kat Peddie, podcast interviews by Ben Horner.
Vegetation/wildlife: the rosebay willowherb, bracken and ferns contninue to grow, a lot of vegetation was stamped down to make space for dancing, more was flattened over the course of the performance.
State of piano: all of the keys had jammed, I had to remove the action leaving just the strings. At the end of the performance I couldn’t fit the action back on – the remaining 7 performances may have to use only the strings.
Unusual happenings: this month’s performance involved Tina Krasevec dancing and her partner David Leahy dancing and playing double bass.
The two dancers started in the clearing next to the piano, out of sight of the audience. The first thing they saw was Tina’s hand poking up over the bushes doing a mongoose impression (one thing that the video lacks is the audience’s point of view). Tina and David made creative use of the environment around the piano. Tina sprinkled handfuls of soil, used her legs to curl ferns over her face, balanced on the trunks and danced right out into the open space going up to 20/30 meters away from the piano. David found the ferns interfering with his bass playing and incorporated them. After a while he stopped playing bass and built a ramshackle sculpture using his instrument and bits of piano (lid, front board, lower board, action etc.).
This performance was in collaboration with the forest. This is something I’m unable to do stuck under the piano so it was lovely that the environment could be creatively involved.
I suppose the piano and me do collaborate with the environment but the rate at which we work together is very slow: the rate at which things grow and decay.
The video camera ran out of batteries after seventeen minutes. The performance lasted for 50 minutes. The video is an inadequate documentation of the performance.
Thank you very much to Tina and David for this fantastic performance. They will be performing again at Free Range on 21st November.
Neil Sloman 1st September 2013, a set on Flickr.
Thank you Neil for these pictures that capture both the performance and the lovely community that has grown around these events.
Note: there are 46 photos in this set. Click here to see the whole set.