The paradoxes inherent in picking music for a last minute improv act
My theory at this point is that MAYBE I want something that flows particularly well. Music that is really interesting on its own so that, if I’m improvising and not doing something particularly put together at some moment, the music will speak in a way that makes it look as interested as I am in moving through to a better physical flow. But I don’t want it to be too hyphy. I think.
I keep getting tempted to have them play some italo disco song for me. Or a cute long kraut rock techno vibe (the rule is I need to dance for over 4 minutes). Or maybe this is my chance to finally dance to Cyndi Lauper’s “When You Were Mine.” But maybe that music would shadow me. Or maybe it’s illegal and Cyndi Lauper’s intellectual property owners would smite my entire struggling arts community for my sin of adaptive fandom.
What I really should be doing, now, and forever more, is picking a song one of my friends wrote and recorded, I do believe. And when I advertise that I’m going to be dancing, I can advertise their independently produced music and help others find their cool shit. I do tend to dance to lesser known music in general, so I still like to think that I’m helping advertise artists that I like, because someone always asks me what the music was...
... Now my mind is drifting into the angry land of copyright cops and criminalization of social arts-sharing and collaboration. And now drifting to thinking of the time it takes to copycorrectly and what it implies and to how the forces that want copyright recordings to be used only in very narrow contexts, are the same forces that are squeezing musical and artistic laborers’ work so they only make a tenth of a fraction of a cent for their works, once the lawyers and the businessmen that own their intellectual property are through with them. Anyways. If I focus on the formal aspects of songs that seem to work well in live aerial dance improv; spinning and not spinning; with floor work and without; with mounting and dismounting; with stillness and dynamism... then I can get better at being able to apply those principles to my friends’ music to make that music look even better than it already is, and to picking the music that will also help make me look better. But it’s hard when there are these scary giants that I happen to know about who might want to kill my dancing being seen if it is accompanied by the songs I’m studying; the works I’m learning from, because dancers don’t have time or money to reinvent the wheel and that’s bad practice when it comes to ideas and invention anyways... And, I mean, yeah what I’m actually about to work on, for the next show that isn’t a last minute improv bit, I hope, is DOIN IT LIVE. The music. Doing an act with some live musician buddies. Probably including myself because our performance space is actually too small for more than two people to be performing in the light at any given point (Do you see what we’re dealing with here?). And of course I also need to test that in the practice studio first, because I need to be able to show up and set up the sound and just give one (TRS probably) feed to whoever’s running sound, because we’re not dealing with a sound board here, either. The producers don’t have time to mentally process alternative tech setups, so I have to just have it ready to go and not even hint to them that I’m doing something different until it’s 100% ready. Anyways when last minute choices come up though. What do I look for in ANY music that comes my way? What makes a good improv bit? Am I allowed to THINK about heavily policed music? Because if I listen to it too much, then it will be what I think of to use in a last minute emergency setting. Or just in general because the medium is dance. It’s like if you threatened someone for not paying a subscription fee for the design of their lighting instruments. That designer/ engineer is not the person doing the work *in the moment the audience is watching them*. That designer/engineer doesn’t have to show up or spend any more time. They get money from the sales of their product, once. The live performer is the lighting tech and the DJ and the dancer and the announcer and everyone else who is in the room. Anyways anyways anyways. What is good movement music? Do voices get in the way or do they add to it? Should the voices speak to the costume? Should I speak? Should I yell over the music? Should I try to hit moves with the beat or avoid hiting moves with the beat; avoid getting caught up in the beats and instead get caught in the interesting in betweens? If I keep working at framing and reframing this question in subsequent iterations of blogging, will better answers emerge? “A question well put is a problem half solved” -- John Dewey. It’s my favorite quote. John Dewey would have detested people who discourage people riffing off of each others’ literature. Riffing and improvising are the musical and dance equivalents of hypothesizing, formulating, and responding. I’ve spent more time writing this than I had tonight. I still need to pack up my makeup, pack up my three costume options, go to my partner’s house to see if he has shiny leggings I can use, practice trumpet (update: I ran out of time), and hope that I can nail down a few solid solo loop pedal songs in the near future so I can just run away from the world of recorded music problems and be some raw force of lonely sound and movement instead.
