AN obscure 1950s toy piano will feature in an exploratory concert of improvised dance and music in Fremantle on Sunday.
A collaboration between the Walyalup Weekend of Improvised Music and Make-Shift Evenings, the event includes a workshop for dancers and musos in the afternoon and an evening concert at PS Art Space, where the audience get to join in at the end.
The opening act is Antoinette Carrier, a local pianist and composer who uses magnetic tape and synthesisers to create layered pieces of music. But on Sunday she’ll be bashing away on two toy pianos because they are “fun”.
• A toy piano
“I have a vintage French piano from the 1950s and a newer one,” she says. “Each has two octaves and the notes can be played singly or in chords.”
Carrier says Singaporean American musician Margaret Leng Tan is a master of the toy piano.
For the past three decades she’s been touring the world playing concerts on her 51cm-high joanna, and also performs classical music using unconventional instruments like toy drums, soy sauce dishes and cat-food cans.
Also on the bill is electronic artist August Pope, dancer Zendra Giraudo, flautist Gabe McMahon, and a collaboration between saxophonist Josten Myburgh and dancer Daisy Sanders, who have been performing together for six years and will be running the workshop in the afternoon.
• Saxophonist Josten Myburgh (above), and dancer Daisy Sanders (below).
The workshop will explore how dancers and musicians of all abilities can improvise together.
Myburgh says it’s important that dancers and musicians trust each other and have interdependence.
“Daisy often jokes that she ‘doesn’t listen to me’,” says Myburgh.
“Over time I’ve started to explore closing my eyes so I’m not looking at her, either. The connection we have is more telepathic or energetic, and defined by a deep trust in each other.
“…I think we’ll be encouraging that in the workshop participants: not feeling like you have to understand each other, or always be somehow in balance, when you’re a dancer and musician working together.
“Deep trust, rather than politeness. The musical metaphor would be polyphony – two lines working around each other, moving between dissonance and consonance.”
Myburgh says they don’t have any outline for their performance and just dive into the unknown, but “it does tend to feature sudden shifts in moods, and can go from quite serious to quite silly very quickly.”
Improvisation is synonymous with jazz, and Myburgh says growing up they were a fan of innovative saxophonist Eric Dolphy, who played “angular” melodies and wide intervals, and emulated the sounds of human voices and animals in his jazz improv.
Myburgh says like Dolphy, modern improvisers shouldn’t ape the past and instead find their own contemporary muse to keep the music fresh and inventive.
“In the late 1950s, jazz musicians experimented with breaking out of the frameworks of chord progressions and metred rhythm towards a totally improvised music more based around pure, intense presence, and a freedom to make any kind of sound,” Myburgh says.
“Roscoe Mitchell’s 1966 record, aptly named Sound, is an incredible example of this.
“What I do when I improvise is similar, except I think I belong to a tradition of musicians who looked for new forms, rather than referencing the sounds and gestures from the jazz tradition, as we felt it wasn’t our place, wasn’t our culture.
“To be briefly polemic – I think more musicians here should be asking these kinds of questions of what they’re doing.”
The free music/dance workshop will be held at Goolugatup Heathcote in Applecross from 1:30pm-3:30pm on September 8 (rsvp essential) and the concert is at PS Art Space in Fremantle at 7pm (pay what you can). For more details see wwim.net/wwimakeshift.
by STEPHEN POLLOCK