Making decisions
January 16, 2004
A completely different approach would be to make a poor and rough scetch of the whole performance and then work more and more into the details. It proberbly wouldn’t work in the case of Verdensteatret though. Something about what we’re doing reminds me of writing Palestrina excercises during the composition studies: If you do a change locally in one bar the consequences are global affecting the whole of the excersise.
Working with Frode Thorsen was the opposite extreme: We had limited time for devellopment and Frode was really good at forcing us to make decissions and structures based on the limited number of improvisations we did.
" I only had a few days – and the effect of this is to focus attention. Less exploration of all the possible journeys you could make more determination to take one journey (even if the choice of it is initially rather arbitrary) and make it take you somewhere."
It’s interesting that Eno seems to believe that this approach gives more surprising results:
" Working with greater leisure my ideas become much more "reasonable" and surprise me less."
(Quotes from Brian Eno: A Year with Swollen Appendices January 12th)