Jam Sessions Blog A process journal for artists.

New Blog!!

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:02:42 -0500

We’ve moved the Jam Session blog!

We are now located right here. Now that we are hosted on Blogger, it will be easier for Jam participants to share their feedback and observations. We hope to get a robust conversation going so please join in! Don’t wait until the next jam - let us know what you’re interested in working on!

Thanks, Melissa

Storytelling Part 2

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 23:01:32 -0400

Storytelling continued today with a dynamic and invigorating jam session! We had three new jammers join us, which is always wonderful - we thrive on that new energy and perspective.

For today’s work, we took one story - the Brothers Grimm’s version of Rapunzel - and split up the jammers into three groups - two groups of three and one of four. Each group had to devise a retelling of the story or part of the story and each had a different lens with which to tell it:

Narrative voice
Genre
Time Signature/Tempo

It was a great exercise in perspective and again, there was a wonderful payoff in seeing a story that you knew taken apart, reassembled or re-imagined.

Highlights (there were so many, really):

GENRE: The delicious and detailed French-speaking version with a Rapunzel that provided her (his?) own sound effects. It managed to humanize the “evil” witch all the while make smoking a cigarette a la film noir seem new again. It also gave new meaning to the song: “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.”
NARRATOR: The giddy and quirky version interrupted by an inquisitive narrator that used feet to act out the critical points of the story. It was a great reminder that sometimes the simplest act can have a magnetizing effect - no need for costumes, light, set, etc. At that moment, all we wanted to watch were the feet!
TIME/TEMPO: This was a beautiful and haunting deconstruction - I wished we had more time to let this one keep unfolding (maybe next session, guys?). It’s outside narration and morphing characters really tied into the primal and emotional elements of the story. The group used great imagery - Rapunzel and her hair dragging her Prince across the floor. Economy of text and use of still moments made this really mesmerizing to watch.

I’m really looking forward to our next session at the end of this month. Perhaps we’ll continue with Storytelling through the end of 2009. There seem to be so many places to go!

Storytelling Part 1

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:27:10 -0400

On Saturday 10/3 we had the pleasure of working at one of the studio spaces at Dance Theatre Workshop. It was gorgeous - huge, lots of windows, full of light, nice sound system (so I didn’t need to bring my portable speakers after all!). We had an early start - 10AM! - but you know what? It was so awesome to really be starting the day with a training session. How lucky were we?

The session was really refreshing, perhaps because we all knew that we would be continuing our work and exploration beyond just this one day.

Each jammer was asked to think of a story they were told as a child. It could have been a fairytale or a family legend - whatever first came to mind. Then, I asked each person to create a series of five pictures or tableaux in which they could tell the story without text. Placement in the room of each tableaux was important; ultimately we decided that the audience would sit in the middle so that the stories were told around us. We told the stories in four rounds:

First showing, followed by observations.
Second showing: each artist was asked to make a change to their style. For example, Jennifer (company member) has a very definitive style to her movement - it is very contained, purposeful and controlled. So her challenge was to be lose and free and uncontained.
Third showing: a genre was assigned. For example, new jammer Joy (welcome, Joy!) was asked to do her story a la hip hop. Jam regular, G, was assigned horror (which turned out to be a prescient suggestion!)
Fourth showing: the artist could now use any version of his or her story (based on the previous rounds) but could now tell their story with text as they moved from picture to picture.

It was a really satisfying payoff at the end to finally hear the stories, especially since we had each started to form our own narrative or ideas based solely on the movement-only version.

Two moments stand out to me:

When Katy, who has a great sense of shape and using or enveloping space with large gestures and an expressive face, was challenged to tell her story as Kabuki theater (OK, none of us are experts in this, but the idea was that her movement was limited and gestures were enhanced and more detailed). The result was both beautiful and awkward. We all agreed we could have watched Katy’s expressive hands for the rest of the jam!
Sonja was challenged to flip her storytelling from graceful and innocent to a sultry cabaret act. Once we heard the story at the end - which would never have “logically” been set in that genre, it was a real eye-opener, similar to the moment in Gypsy when “Let me entertain you” goes from vexing nursery rhyme territory to seductive strip-tease. It was a great reminder that context can reveal so much about a story or a situation.

Curious about Jam Sessions?

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:29:13 -0400

Are you curious about Jam Sessions?

On Saturday, September 26 from 4-6PM, The Anthropologists will be hosting a FREE “Open House” jam session. If you’ve never been to a jam session, haven’t joined us in a while, or if you come to every jam, please come and jam with us on 9/26! We will be at Battery Dance, located at 380 Broadway (btwn White & Walker).

The Open House will be 100% free so bring a friend and come check out what it’s all about!

Restructuring Jam Sessions

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:18:48 -0400

The Anthropologists have been hosting jam sessions for 2 1/2 years, during which we’ve had the great pleasure of meeting and working with a variety of artists. Recently, a number of us sat down to discuss how we might grow and develop the jam sessions to ensure that they are feeding our artistic appetites and challenging us as artists. We are eager to make the sessions more rigorous and focused, so with that in mind, we are reformatting the jams so that we can delve deeper into the work. Starting this fall, we will schedule the jams in three-session blocks so that we can work progressively and cumulatively. Each block will have a specific focus (e.g. exploration of a text, character development through gestural choreography, choral voice exploration & group song), but will still have room for spontaneity. Jammers are not required to attend all three sessions - you can attend any of them - but artists will benefit more from attending all.

The suggested donation for each jam session remains at $5, but we will not turn anyone away.

If you have questions or thoughts, please don’t hesitate to be in touch!

Group Song

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:52:37 -0400

The July 11 jam session was extremely energetic - impressive for a hot July afternoon!

We had several jammers offer games and exercises and it was refreshing to try some utterly new things. (The photo above is from a leader/follower game led by company member Katy Rubin).

I think the surprise of the day, though, was group song.

Jammer Anna gave us what many considered a horrifying assignment: fake sing opera. It might sound bizarre but it was a wonderful release and left everyone with smiling in a sort of surprised and dazed way. It was an effective way to use a more full voice, to invoke resonance and to get out of our heads about singing.

Being given permission to sound a little silly or to not sing “well” - the emphasis was on the power of your voice, not your ability to sing the right words or hit all the notes correctly - was something, I think, that many of us don’t do. We are so trained to think that only people with an incredible capacity for singing - tone, resonance, interpretation, vibrato, voice control, etc. - should sing. However, this is very limiting in the sense that using song can be beneficial in many ways as a training mechanism, among other things.

This exercise evolved into singing rounds - three groups singing “Row Your Boat.” We started with a simple song but in our feedback session afterward we discussed ways to build on group song in the jam sessions. It will definitely be something we’ll be experimenting with in the near future.

Upcoming Jam Sessions: Summer 2009

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:31:43 -0400

Recharge your creative energy batteries with us.

Sunday, July 12, 1-4PM Panetta Movement Center (214 W 29th St. 10th FL btwn 7th & 8th)
Saturday, July 18, 3-6PM Battery Dance (380 Broadway, 5th FL, btwn White & Walker St.)
Saturday, August 8, 3-6PM Battery Dance
Saturday, August 22, 1-4PM Battery Dance

Please come with movement clothes and prepared to work barefoot. We ask for a $5 donation to help cover space costs but no one will be turned away!

Voice Sourcing

Thu, 9 Apr 2009 22:58:27 -0400

This past jam session on Sunday, March 29, we focused on the voice. In the first half of the session we spent time exploring with sound, unconcerned about quality in the traditional sense. The object was not to produce “pretty” or “aesthetically pleasing” sound but to explore resonance, pitch and tone in ways that we are usually not permitted. Some artists explored the interplay between body and sound and how one affected the other. This exercise did not have very many limitations; it was a free (and hopefully freeing) exploration of the voice. We hope to continue with this type of work in future jam sessions. [Editor’s note: we recently had a workshop with Tom O’Connor, a movement teacher, who taught us several partnering exercises for body mobilization that also help open up resonance in the voice, something that we may introduce in future jam sessions.]

For the second half of the jam, artists paired up and each pair had a rod. The initial goal was to move around the space holding the rod between partners by the hand. We then introduced a sound to initial the passing of control between “leader” and “follower.” Then, artists were given the words “here” and “now” to use during those exchanges and it was interesting to see language developing - was it always laden with meaning or was it possible to explore these words just as sound? The last layer of this exercise was adding music to play with.

In a post-jam discussion we considered whether or not language was introduced too soon into the work and if we spend more time on voice work without introducing that type of “meaning.” In the coming weeks, we’ll continue on our voice sourcing journey.

Here are some photos from the day’s work:

I particularly love this series:

An Exploration of Hamlet

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:45:58 -0400

At our last jam session this past weekend, we were in the beautiful, light-filled Panetta Movement Studios. An open improvisation evoked a scene from Hamlet so we chose to focus our composition work for the day on the scene where Hamlet kills Polonius. This was a relatively new way of working for us - to approach a composition with concrete characters and story-line but we found there was so much to explore there. We were able to go through the scene once and then repeat with adjustments. Hopefully, with our upcoming three-hour jam sessions, the extra hour will allow for in-depth lab work. Here is a series of photos, taken by Roberta Berman, from this composition.