Author Archives for pianointhewoods1

Next performance

The next performance will take place at 13.00 on Sunday 1st December and will feature Kat Peddie reading her poetry alongside a small team of piano bowers (people bowing the piano strings). As usual e-mail me (sambailey1@mac.com) if you’d like to come.

Performance 5: with Tina Krasevec and David Leahy (Sunday 1st September 2013)

No embedded player? Try here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJilptXLQA

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.

 

david and tina no 3 piano in woods sept 1stdavid and tina no 2 piano in woods sept 1st_0004david and tina piano in woods sept 1st_0001piano in woods fixed shot sept 1stIMG_0758IMG_0751
IMG_0750IMG_0749IMG_0741IMG_0740IMG_0739IMG_0734
IMG_0732IMG_0731IMG_0726IMG_0724IMG_0722IMG_0709
IMG_0705IMG_0703IMG_0700IMG_0697IMG_0688IMG_0683

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.

Next performance

The fifth piano in the woods performance will include dancer Tina Krasevec and double-bassist/dancer David Leahy as well as myself playing, bowing and stimulating what is left of the piano. This performance will take place at 3.00pm on Sunday 1st September. E-mail if you would like to attend (sambailey1@mac.com).