Maria Schneider, a Grammy award
winning jazz composer, has been at the University of Miami for a week-long
residency with the students in the Henry Mancini Institute at Frost School of Music. She has a love of
working with dancers and musicians improvising together to create new spontaneous
performance works.She organized another
dance/music improvisation workshop Monday, October 17 from 7:10-8:10pm at the
Nancy Green Hall. A similar event took place previously before the pandemic.
One musician was paired with one dancer, at times several musicians
collaborated with several dancers, each inspiring each other to move and play
together.
The videos bellow document the
participation of Frost's Professor Jorge Morejón and students Kevin King (oboe) and Andrew Tinch (guitar).
The event included other musicians such as Janelle Finton (trumpet), Luca Stine (trumpet), Aron
Stornaiulo (dance), Savannah Methner (trumpet), Sam Leviatin (trumpet), Henry
Mohr (drums), Sofia Garas (voice) and Jameson Falconer
(voice).The other dancers were
Professor Carol Kaminsky, Professor Cristina Leyva, graduate student Esther
Baker, students Nicole Kujas and Ashna Vaidyanath.
Beyond the Sounds of Silence: Latin-American Artists Connecting Art, Sound and Society
1
Gustavo Matamoros
Mindful Listening
I combine recording the sound and the environment. Eventually, I try to echo the behavior of most people in the audience. My eyes closed to let the sound permeate my senses without visual distractions. Matamoros moves his hand through the space as he produces a variety of surprising sounds. In the meantime, I manage to record myself as I try to also be mindful of the sound and the images it produces in my mind.
2
Richard Garet
Head Sound
This is an attempt to relax while the electronic sounds travel through the space. I try to match the movement of my neck / head with the sound's mood. I am conscious of the surrounding audience and yet, while I also record myself, I find a way to produce minimal movement. This way of improvising dance, becomes an ideal way of subverting the conventions imposed on dancing bodies by highly formalized spaces on bodies that need to move to sounds of silence or sounds of noise, music included.
Zapateado Sonoro
Again, trying to not called attention to my zapateado, while the sound-artist was still performing, I recorded my dancing feet. The discreet zapateo was quiet and silent whereas the sound produced by Garet was gradually intensified, rhythmic and vibratory. The untitleness of the piece stimulated my creativity and freedom to find my own meaning, my own purpose. The dance allowed a connection between my feet and the sound, between my creative mind and my sense of propriety, between my phone/camera and my zapateado.
3
Muu Blanco
Creepy Sound Bells
Blanco's piece relied on the identifiable sounds of church bells. The darkness of the space, the distance from the artist at work, and the number of audience members crowding the area, made use just my fingers and the phone/camera. Thus, an imagined Washington DC where sound bells mixed with the sound of pedestrians and city life, became a creepy experience where my fingers, moving in front of the lens, become principle dancers of an un-choregraphed dance macabre.
4
Yucef Merhi
The Altar Con Passion
After Merhi's generous explanation of his artistic process, it became obvious to me that the piece had become, perhaps inadvertently, an altar. Out of respect for the artist's work, I decide to just insert myself within the camera's frame as an offering. The message: "compassion," reminded me of Kundera's brilliant explanation of the meaning of the word compassion within the Latin culture (compasion or con-pasion) and the way it is interpreted within the Anglo culture. The passion Merhi's shows when talking about his work corroborates Kundera's assessment of the passion with which Latin peoples live.
