Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion Score Production Sessions

As mentioned in the Final Filming report, markering their fast movement manually with Piecemaker was too time-consuming (the video fragment on the right from Both Sitting Duet - armswings - was manually markered using Piecemaker). A partially computer based solution using the Kinect data looked promising. In addition to working with the Kinect data, the team reviewed interviews from the earlier research sessions, in particular the October 2011 meeting. Basic patterns Jonathan and Matteo described working with (e.g. 7, 6, 14, 14, 7 from John Cage's 'Lecture on Nothing') were probed to see if they would reveal new permutations. References or 'resonances' they mentioned were researched, e.g. the hand gestures of Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Click full screen to better view the relation between the markers and the movement. Video: Motion Bank

During one email exchange in early July, Florian was seeking more clarity about a pattern called A-B-B-A which Jonathan had explained in the October 2011 session in Brussels (see video to the right, which can also be found in the Patterns & Pulse score set). Jonathan wrote back "ABBA and BAAB are permutations of arm waving phrases that appear in almost all the Speaking Dance arm waving. But they're usually mixed in or lead on to other patterns (...), so even I don't know with any great clarity where they are."

"This is a pattern called A-B-B-A" (Patterns & Pulse. Seven Duets On-Line Score). Video: Motion Bank

The next day Jonathan brought in the presentation "Rebelling Against Limit" a lecture concert for which the basic text had been prepared for Tanzcongress in June 2013. This text explores the usefulness or not of the structures and scores they use in their work (review of lecture concert at Sadler's Wells 15 January 2013. The wide-ranging discussions that followed circled around the topic of where and under what conditions do structures collapse -- and how might that be embraced on what is offered on the Motion Bank website. 

Image credit: Peter Rapp drawing for Rebelling Against Limit. © Peter Rapp

For the 13 September meeting (shortened to one day with Jonathan and Matteo), at Artsadmin Studios in London, Jonathan and Matteo were sent a 'package' of performers and generators to view. The morning discussion focused on how to get the most out of these ideas including connecting them to music. In the afternoon, they were interviewed separately on the same 10 questions (download the list).

One of the original ideas gathered at the start of the project at the first Brussels research meeting in July 2011 had been to "find the right tone, for example hand-made and human-scale". With only a few months to realise the finished online score website for Jonathan and Matteo, it could be said that a number of those earliest ideas (see Haffner's original document) were still in play.

'Generator' (background) and 'Performer' (foreground). Screenshot: Seven Duets On-Line Score