A huge storm chased me down park row, past the violin shops and the hospital, into the Cube Cinema yesterday Wednesday 31st for our first Cube Orchestra rehearsal after the Here Shop Gig.
Present were Belinda, Tomoko, Gareth and myself. We took our time in setting up amplifiers, and finding some old drums for Tomoko to play, while we chatted. After some chat about what went wrong on Saturday, Belinda wrote down a list of points which I hope she'll send to the list - quite openly worded and focusing on the percieved problem rather than the percieved solution. I hope we can use all the problems constructively to refine our guidelines for new people and for participating and in preparation for concerts.
Then it was time to play. One of the comments from before was "lack of conductor" or "limited ways of communicating during performance". Belinda suggested a great exercise where you appoint an "invisible conductor", disguised as one of the musicians and then everyone follows what they do - so their music becomes the conducting for that time. The best bit was when Tomoko conducted by playing drums and egg shakers - with Guitar and Wind instruments maybe we're accustomed to what to do with certain types of sounds - like to a jazz chord we might tend to solo and vice versa... With Tomoko's abstract noises, disassociated from her musical ability. we were much more free to react in creative ways to her noises.
Then we got out the Brazil DVD that I'd brought, and we discussed how we can organise the rescoring for the end of this month, so that it's not a big boring 2 hours. We put on the first dream sequence, when Sam Lowrie flies through the air and gets attacked by astroturf skyscrapers.
We quickly found out a couple of issues:
- With 4 people it was really easy to concentrate on the film and at the same time follow everyone else
- Some dialogue sections were a bit hard to do (not much happens... People might want to concentrate on following the subtitles)
- We got bored after about 10 minutes or less and lost inspiration.
- For me and Gareth who knew the film better, it was easier to do incidental music.
So the result could be that for the rescoring we
- Divide ourselves up into small groups of up to 8 people for each scene or DVD section.
- Appoint someone who knows the scene to do the incidental music if needed. Maybe someone else can play the general feel of that scene.
- Get someone to present each section. The cube are fine for us to do bits of different films, rather than just one film from beginning to end.
Also we'll need to have someone in the projection room and give them an exact list of sections we'll do from what film and in what order.
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