i was fixated on presenting the above pages to the performers as scores. i wanted to write my own notation on these cards to then scan them in layered forms.

lydia pointed out that making marks on the papers could be something we give to the group to do. we can allow line-making and mark-making to guide the performers.

the first activity was a realisation of the 'do-document-do' process lydia came up with before the meeting. we wanted to see how the group responded to documenting their own improvisation and how this could be used to generate a score for reperformance.

the instructions we gave were to do something and document it on the paper while doing it.

after lydia's running and scales scores, we had a go at performing my 'deck of cards' score.

we did an hour of free improvisation

i think it was difficult for us to transition into improvising with movement.

(with the exception of maxime, who had a profound architectural awareness of his body and movement.)

we started noisily, but eventually we moved to more notey playing. there were nice moments of interaction.

everyone tried different objects and techniques, interacting with everyday objects as well.

i felt most comfortable with moving when what i was doing was inadvertently creating sound in some way.

such as walking back and forth over my guitar with my shoelaces untied so that they hit the strings.

maxime:

• obfuscation seems to be about hiding things, it has purpose.
• ambiguity is not about purposefully hiding something. 
• what is ambiguity’s etymology? is the origin in the latin, ‘ambi’, to do with 2-sided things. 
• ambiguity seems to be about being between 2 sides of things, obfuscation is more general.

the result is a difference in description of the same sound, and this difference is performed as the card gets passed around:

we spoke about the tension between giving them something prescriptive to do versus allowing the piece to develop out of them.

lydia's scores:

maxime liked that there was room for interpretation, and that the cards weren’t too precise. he liked that each card told you what to do but that there were so many variations you could do on that.

james: going slowly leaves cards overturned for the end when there’s still new stuff going on. if he were to do it he would go a lot slower, which people agreed with.

we began the session with a beautiful warmup score to do with observation which lydia came up with. 

in this activity, performers alternate between describing a movement/sound and doing it, and describing someone else’s movement/sound and making slight alterations to it.

these descriptions get passed around the group and re-performed.

movement score:

run across the room backwards and forwards. look at the distribution of people in the space as you go.

you can stop when you want to for 7 seconds then continue running.

sound score:

sing an upwards scale of 4 notes. allow the fifth note to hit the roof and then choose another scale. maintain an equal rhythm for yourself throughout.

try to remember things you notice, the natural patterns in sound and correspondence. and how the space and others affect your choices.

i said that from my perspective it ‘looked like a busy office with people passing memos around’ which was half a joke, darius said he enjoyed that aspect of it.

my scores:

we begin with a score i prepared for this session:

prior to our first session, lydia and i meet.

my scores:

in making my score for 3 performers, i was thinking about:

we wanted to bring the cards into physical space, and allow the group to arrange them and write on them.

we placed a pile of blank cards in the middle of the space.

we asked everyone to collect any amount of cards and place them in an arrangement that works for them.

using a pen, experiment with doing and notating, and doing again, using sound and movement.

following our discussion after the previous session, i began experimenting with the individual, physical cards as spaces for open instructions, or as spaces for writing. 

georgie:

• ambiguity indicates freedom. 
• all interpretations are allowed.
• ambiguity can exist both in the process and in the performance, and these are subtly different.

i started writing out some simple prompts on the cards. i played with how these could be used in a tactile/interactive way and how they could imbue the space with movement as well as sound:

i started to see the instructions as possibilities for setting a process in motion, as cards would be passed around and performed multiple times by others.

i tried to retain aspects of the 'score-making' exercise we did in the previous session by including cards that allow performers to write their own card.

i also wanted to carry over aspects of the 'do-document-do' cycle, so incorporated elements of gazing and translating into some of the cards.

at the forefront of my mind was trying to invite the performers into the creation of the piece. i tried to leave plenty of room for them to take the performance into their own hands.

we needed to critically address the questions of score-making, prescription, and the inclusion of movement and sound.

how many cards does each performer have?

• do the cards have similar instructions?
• how different are the cards?
• how many cards can create an experience of similarity and ambiguous difference?

lydia felt like it would be an invasion of privacy to look at what someone was writing as they were describing a sound

after this session, lydia and i spoke.

we were pleasantly surprised at maxime's eagerness and willingness to do movement, being that he is the least involved with experimental performance in the group.

others with more experience seemed more uncomfortable at times, but everyone was good at picking up the movement ideas quickly.

prior to the session, lydia and i reflected on some images from the improvisation.

i used my untied shoelaces to play a guitar that was on the floor by walking back and forth over it. 

thinking of shoelaces, of string, of lines, of tim ingold.

i enjoyed how structured it felt, although i remind myself i am not making 'the piece' yet.

in pairs, one person closes their eyes and moves according to how their body wants to move, and the other person partakes in active and caring observation. the partners swap roles.

lydia noticed one of my scores on which i had drawn a stave by hand.

she related an experience she had of drawing lines of similar lengths in repeating intervals during a class:

• she became aware of the regularity, the time, and the feeling of this repeated action of drawing.
• the feeling of the muscles moving in the same way.
• the way her attention shifted between different aspects of the action.
• the sound of the pen as it moved across the paper.

we decided to do this exercise with the group.

building on a very generative previous session, lydia and i thought it would be a good idea to both try our hand at making some more cards to refine the process. 

we also interrogated the issue of score-making.

• until now, i've been making scores for the group to perform, then judging the result based on the quality of the performance of the score.
• lydia questioned whether this was the most helpful way to arrive at material.
• not least because any score i make will exclude movement.
• they also don't leave much room for performers to bring their personhood to the piece we're trying to construct.

lydia was right.

lydia: there was a 'quiet emergence of stillness and silence' when you stay with it for long enough.

james felt that this score was more successful than the one from last week

the plan:

1. individual introductions, sharing our practices and interests
2. lydia leads a check-in (see 'meeting 3')
3. i introduce the keywords, 'ambiguity', and 'obfuscation', and we give everyone 5 minutes to write a stream of consciousness association with those words
4. lydia leads a number of physical scores:
   1. body scan
   2. scan and absorb the environment into the body
   3. responding to sensation in the body
   4. moving and narrating your movement
   5. holding and humming
5. a break
6. do the score i prepared for the group, with objects and suggestions, facilitated verbally.

devising session 1 - 03.03.25 (keywords, movement score, object score)

devising session 2 - 10.03.25 (alterations score, free improvisation)

between meetings - 16.03.25 (cards scanned, lines)

devising session 3 - 18.03.25 (line drawing, do-doc-do, cards)

devising session 4 - 24.03.25 (sound + movement scores, the first deck)

devising session 5 - 31.03.25 (cards score for three performers)

as a group, we had 5 devising sessions. these lead on from mine and lydia's meetings.

during this time, the focus was not so much on arriving at a piece, as much as being together as a group, trying anything and everything. seeing what material stands out.

this included text scores, but also 'non-musical' and 'non-dance' activities.

this section will include what activities we did, the discussions we had as a group about them, and notes from my meetings with lydia about each session.

lydia prepared two scores: one to do with movement, and one to do with sound.

we did each score separately, and then combined them.

i wanted to build on the idea of score-making in/as the performance which i enjoyed from the previous session. it seemed to me like a good way to bring the personalities of the people into the piece.

me:

• ambiguous materials, ambiguous tonal centres, ambiguous rhythmic groupings.
• obfuscation is like the opposite of clarity and has a sense of shifting focus.
• obfuscation isn’t a total hiding of something, it also could exist on a spectrum or in time, something being obfuscated.
• it could look like shifting density or something coming out of focus or growing translucency reducing the sharpness of detail.

lydia:

• ambiguity has an essence of the intention to find something.
• en route to understanding something, but you are stuck en route.
• ambiguity exists in negative definitions - trying to delineate what something is by explaining what it is not.
• the thing is never defined, but its presence felt more and more.

the group responded well to these basic calls to movement. the order of scores slowly introduced awareness, movement, and consciousness of movement.

it was a very beautiful experience. the sense of caring observation felt very real to me. i was taking care of this vulnerable person, projecting a sense of care onto them through my gaze.

we came to the conclusion that we should find a mid-point between complete freedom and total prescription that allows space for them to bring their whole selves to the performance.

lydia:

dipping in and out of being in the room and just doing what she wanted to do.

when there’s just one dancer you felt like a thread between everyone.

how did that look compositionally? (how) does that invite an observer in?

instruments were like objects or props, but she didn't have one.

how do we solve the problem of getting everyone to do movement and make sound, how do we develop a working process that allows space for both?

this was, nominally, the last of our devising sessions. by this point, even if we hadn't figured out exactly how to use them, we felt that the cards were becoming an important part of this piece and the practice. from here on, we were more focused on finding better ways to work with the cards.

-> constructing <-

holding and humming:

• we did this in 3 pairs.
• the visual and the aural element of the score was very interesting.
• the hummers were barely audible; the result of three tiny hums in the space was lovely.
• the image of three pillars being squeezed by the others was also very compelling.

the group's associations with 'ambiguity' and 'obfuscation':

making our own marks on cards, arranging them, performing them:

georgie said it felt quite like playing, almost in a childlike way, without being able to communicate properly yet

the line-drawing exercise:

do-document-do exercise:

group responses:

group responses:

group responses:

lydia: thinking about how long to stick with a card became part of the process for her.

each card has 4 instructions:

the first 2 instructions will either:

• ask the player to describe a sound or a movement then perform it
• ask the player to describe another player's sound or movement, then make an alteration to that description.

we agree that we need to give them some freedom and see what they do with it - what comes out of it.

lydia suggests that next week they bring their instruments and we do free improvisation of movement and sound for one hour just to see what happens.

i am excited and worried about this improvisation. worried that movement wouldn't happen, that we weren't there yet.

i suggest i write another score in advance of next week.

we wanted to explore more of the performer-audience dynamic so we decided that in our next run, we would split the room into 3 performers and 3 audience members.

there are moments where only one person was making a sound or movement and the other two people were describing it, and times when everyone was moving.

the activity tries to carry over the act of score-making and documentation as a performance, while also bringing back a sense of similarity and repetition to the practice.

lydia: a self-defining score, made as they go. mark-making or generating rules for themselves through the process. manually tracking or recording what they do.

i made the link to g douglas barrett's a few silence

lines can be readily interpreted through sound and movement.

a line could guide the musicians’ playing, or a dancer's movement.

the line as a journey through something, creating a linear understanding, feelings of progression.

richard long: ‘a line made by walking'

lydia felt that the layered cards and semi-transparent paper spoke to a sense of ambiguity and obfuscation.

lydia: does layering always mean masking and making less clear? can a layer help to define the thing itself?

group responses:

lydia and i develop the idea of a performance-documentation-performance cycle (or 'do-document-do'):

• in this process, the performers 'do' something (make sound, move).
• then they document on paper what they are doing (by some means).
• then they take that documentation and use it as a score to 'do' again.

i can't keep making just sound scores. at the end of the day, all performers will need to be actively doing movement and sound. my scores thus far weren't leaving room for movement.

i suspected that the conceptual framing of a score would be a useful way to give permission for movement.

for musicians who are used to following scores (even experimental ones), an instruction like 'come up with a movement that you can repeat' might be more easily engaged with than if the instruction was verbal.

repetition

• last week's card performance didn't yield much repetition
• how do i create a situation that engenders a 'repetitive' or 'self-similar experience'?
• differences that occur when different people are doing the same thing

for the next session, lydia and i commit to both preparing 'scores' which involve movement as well as sound.

darius: 

• is there a subtler way to think about the intentionality difference between ambiguity and obfuscation?
• is it not true that one thing could unintentionally obfuscate another, e.g. an eclipse? 
• ambiguity is also not necessarily always neutral.
• whose ambiguity? ambiguous to the listener? to the performer? 
• where an ambiguous situation exists for one group, a power dynamic also exists.

james and georgie were unsure of whether they could use verbal communication to 'form a group dynamic' - is talking allowed?

james:

• ambiguity as a kind of busy-ness or conflict between performers.
• obfuscation and ambiguity seem to hold different ideas about intentionality. 
• ambiguity as unintentional, a descriptor of a situation
• obfuscation as intentional. 
• ambiguity seems passive, while obfuscation seems active. obfuscation acts on something which is originally unobscured.

maxime and james both mentioned again how they are self-conscious about their movement

i liked seeing the repetitions, and seeing people observing each other.

lydia introduces her concept, 'material resistance'.

resistance is any aspect of any creative project which causes some friction to the project or process.

embracing material resistance is about seeing these obstacles as creating material for your piece.

examples include: a tight deadline, an unwilling performer, the performance space doesn't have a piano.

these become material resistance for your piece that you can still work with.

i distributed the cards randomly face down to the group. i did not participate.

while this video does not do it justice, i thought it was fascinating to see how various relationships formed and dissolved over the course of the run.

seeing everyone busy themselves with tasks which overlapped sometimes and formed clumps of people was very interesting.

i was surprised at how these individual cards created a network of actions and relationships which was constantly shifting. everyone was on their own path through their instructions, but these often involved other people. the unfolding multiplicity of situations highlighted both the individual and collective.

maxime: it would be interesting if the audience had some way of knowing what cards are in play, but maybe not knowing who has which card.

lydia felt that when repeating a movement or sound of some sort, her attention began quite inward but then expanded to notice what was happening in the space

darius felt like he was ‘working his way through the cards, managing the ones that were coming in’, figuring out when he could do certain things, when he couldn’t - sometimes stressful.

james: it was most successful when there were instructions to follow. the difficult parts were when the instruction was totally open.

james,

trombone

phase 2: do again. take someone else's documentation and try to perform from it, as a score. 

this simple score was tremendously effective, and created very interesting arrangements of bodies, as people paused in different places, and began running again. it imbued the space with quite an electric energy even after we had finished.

we repeated this exercise for a while and we experimented with different interpretations of ‘hitting the roof’ and different vowel sounds and vocal noises.

it was quite difficult to follow the rules and maintain our concentration on the pausing as well as keeping an awareness of the arrangement of bodies in the space.

darius,

melodica

maxime,

piano