ORCiM seminar on Artistic Experimentation

Last week, the Orpheus Research Center in Music organized one of its yearly seminars, this time to find out more about Artistic Experimentation in the Context of Performance Practice. The topic covers part of the group’s research agenda for 2010-2013, which handles Artistic Experimentation in general. (More on this here.) 

The two-day seminar gave the floor to 13 speakers, mainly from  the UK and Scandinavia (one from Belgium and one from Chili), among which improvising and reproductive performers as well as composers handling their own works. The organizers evidently took care to treat the widest possible range of historical and aesthetic vantage points: contemporary and historical jazz and an extremely extended range of classical composed music (from Léonin and Pérotin through Palestrina, Monteverdi, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann and Ravel to Lachenmann, Kurtág and present-day compositions) were set off against more esoteric concepts as ‘ecosonics’ or silence in computer music performance. (The complete program can be downloaded from the bottom of this page.)

The audience of more than 40 researchers – again demonstrating varied backgrounds and expertise – filled the conference hall to the point where the gathering alone promised satisfaction: crowded but cozily collective, with diverse interests merging into focus and opportunities for debate and networking ready to happen.

It is never difficult to detect the naturally gifted conferenciers: regardless of how their story relates to the listener’s reason for being there – if it even does – they succeed in taking you with them through their efficiently set-up argumentation and compelling rhetorical command. In that respect, the balance between the excellent and the less inspirational presentation was not out of the ordinary in this conference. As the order felt almost ‘cadential’ in the way that it seemed to efficiently time the necessary contrast between the dry and the entertaining, it was never really frustrating to see a less experienced speaker miss the opportunity to fulfill the potential of his topic, or to watch the most talented keep the audience on the edge of the seat beyond what the content of his contribution merits.

Regardless of the solidity of the attention span that speakers were able to win from the audience, plenty of the contributed content was worth having been presented for its own sake. I doubt that anyone will forget the impact that the Swiss tenor Valentin Gloor made with the way he managed to establish a perfectly convincing  symbiosis of a lecture about an artistic research project with the performance of that actual project (in which he worked out concepts of association in a theatrically enhanced performance of Schumann songs). Personally, I was happy to get to be introduced by British composer Nicholas Brown to his compositions, enthusiastically welcomed the myth-busting research of Daniel Leech-Wilkinson into Cortot’s performance practice, and hope to learn more about where Christina Kobb’s as yet tentative hypotheses regarding early 19^th century notation of micro-dynamics will take her (and current pianistic performance practical knowledge).

Due to illness and the reluctance to infect others, I stayed at home for the second day. This turned out to be an excellent circumstance, as I found myself reminded of the fact that ORCiM offers live streaming of its events. I did miss two presentations because the speakers wrongly assumed they didn’t need the collar microphone that would have enabled me to hear what they said, but it was a joy to benefit from this technology. Aside from the inability to pose any questions, the streaming offers an absolutely wonderful way to attend a conference without physically being there. Bravo to whomever thought of that!

As much as the production and the content of the seminar left eminently memorable traces, it nevertheless was a disappointing surprise to realize just how few presentations really matched the promise that their title and/or abstract had held. In contrast to the ability of engaging an audience to the full, which is may be more a question of talent than skill, the way a presentation is made to be about what the description says it will be, is but a matter of intention. To an extent, it is understandable that researchers try and present their projects and findings at different conferences to test them for feedback, and invariably this means that the content must sometimes be bent a little to fit the theme of the conference. Certainly, some flexibility should be offered to facilitate this, and it generally is, but in this instance, such flexibility seemed to have been assumed by some presenters to stretch across an all too wide gap between the theme and the presented content. Many titles incorporated the term ‘experiment’ but very few went on to say anything about experimentation. One presenter dug into the etymology by way of introduction, continuing only to leave it undeveloped. For most, it seemed just a word that needed no elaboration, and if the projects that they presented were to be taken as cases of experimentation, then I have witnessed mostly just that: cases of research that relates (more or less) to performance practice – not case studies on artistic experimentation. I have heard no one posing a research question on artistic experimentation and following it up by arguing his or her way towards any type of answer to that question. In fact, hardly any of the presenters took the opportunity to explore the perspectives and the 8 research questions that were offered in the call for proposals as possible points of departure, as intriguing and as begging for treatment as they are. Some presentations could be defended as being about experimental practice in the performance of early music, but not as “revealing experimental performance practices from the past” (all italics are mine); I did not see a presentation handling “a practical approach that takes the 'skilled body' as its point of departure“. Only the broadest “open-ended approach that challenges state-of-the-art practices in the field of music performance“ was recognizably present in some of the presented material. One presenter did clearly start with one of the proposed questions in mind – “How does experimentation 'between' performances (from performance to performance) work?” –  but this was not worked out to move towards any defined insight. There was certainly chamber music in the mix, but we did not learn “How experimentation [works] through collaboration (e.g. chamber music)”, whether “the use and influence of non-musical elements [is] an important factor in experimental performance practices”, of “the relationships between experimentation and improvisation”, on “How experimentation occur[s] in the daily practicing process”, or “What the tensions [are] between 'fidelity to the score' and individuation of performance”.

No conference convener can foresee how presenters will work out their abstracts into presentations, and there was certainly enough that made it worthwhile for anyone with any interest from any angle to have been present. On balance, the seminar invoked the urge to taste more – given ORCiM's long-range interest in artistic experimentation, we can be sure to be offered more.

PechaKucha

There is a trend in the world of presentation called PechaKucha. Pronounced ‘pe-chak-‘cha, the term is Japanese for the noise of chatter. There is much to find on the Internet about its history (e.g. on Youtube or here and here), but its most salient characteristic is the fact that it is formatted by 20 PowerPoint slides, each timed to last 20 seconds – no more and no less. Totaling 6’40”, this presentation model is typically prescribed for PechaKucha Nights, of which there are dozens per night on a global scale and which consist of a dozen or so such presentations. As trends go, one can expect a lot of babble clouding their potential, or lack thereof, so I decided to go and sit in on a PechaKucha Night myself.

PechaKucha is an excellent exercise in being concise and to the point, and in timing the telling of a story. The ruthless format makes it easy to identify the gifted or well-prepared presenters: for some those 20” are too long and they are embarrassingly lost for words when the image is not ready to move on yet, for others it is by no measure enough to say all they think they should tell, ending up explaining a slide that has already been replaced a while before and struggling to catch up.

Here also, of course, Wagenaar’s art (see another post) applies – I don’t think I'll forget about the Smart Grid presentation, in which that term was smartly repeated with every slide – but it does so also to the verbal part: since slides are the focal point, much more than in regular presentations where they change only when the presenter is ready to move on (the PechaKucha audience sees a clock on the screen to make the passing of time explicit), their choice is an even more crucial ingredient. The images form the backbone of the presentation: the slide selection enables or disables the flow of the talk and the timing steers the structure of what has become a storyboard. The presenter’s challenge is reduced to a tough one for he has to develop a story structure that is both flexible to match the narrative logic and strict in keeping with the 20” rhythm.

With the naïve expectation of going to the PechaKucha Night to hear research presentations (I’ll explain why that was my mind set), I soon feared to have made a mistake and to be surrendered to enduring sales pitches from corporate marketing executives that had discovered yet another way to Spam their way into an audience’s awareness. Yet, I am happy to conclude that those had actually been a minority: most were idealists who came to show their passion for something that would have the hardest time getting exposure through the regular promotion channels in their field, such as a chef who showed how his restaurant thrives on food that is cultivated under his own supervision in a radius of maximum 30km, or a young gallery owner developing new ways to connect the collector with the artists. Most satisfactory was to realize that I would probably never have learned of such initiatives if I hadn’t gone to this event.

The format is definitely a sign of the times, with people seeking new ways to divulge information, ways that are in keeping with the possibilities of new media and cater to the frustration of the limits that the old media suffer from. The way PechaKucha Nights further connect to our time is noticed in the interaction that the audience is offered by seeing live Twitter comments appear on a second screen.

Wondering if anything can be relayed in some 6 minutes without losing the opportunity to explore some depths, the format is also easily associated with the sound-bite needs of the zapping generation. Yet, looking and listening to a radiologist showing the potential of present-day technology in his field, it must be admitted that the advantage of being forced to compress for PechaKucha’s sake outweighs the danger of overloading a longer and more loosely timed presentation. Perhaps more problematic is the level at which the image rules, rendering facial expression of the presenter not only useless (nobody sees it, especially in the big halls PechaKucha is staged in, with a large screen for the slides but no comparable interest in highlighting the presenter), but even a waste of misplaced effort: it is the inflexion of the voice, if anything, that must take care of the expressive necessities.

Why posting this, then? I am very much occupied with dissemination of artistic research and how it can be developed to be more efficient than by taking over formats from other/older disciplines. An artistic researcher’s presentation is not well served by some of the traditional ways: concerts are deficient because to play a composition does not transfer enough information to know how the piece or the performance can be reproduced; paper alone will not do either, since new insights in making sounds are often better off when heard instead of read about. New technologies provide opportunities here, with e.g. on-line publishing that can integrate sound and moving image. In the same vein, new media and new formats are worthwhile to keep an eye on: it is easy to see how PechaKucha sessions may replace the tradition of posters sessions at scientific gatherings. The event I witnessed was the closing session of an international conference, providing those for whom there had been no time to schedule a fully-fledged presentation an alternative to be heard.

On an artistic level, the PechaKucha format is inspiring as well. One presentation was made by a photographer who showed 20 items of her work while a live flutist played a composition that had been written for that particular slide show. There were no spoken comments. Thinking of the specificity of live artistic research dissemination, a composer may well see the creative advantage in showing 20 slides of text while a musician plays the necessary musical comment, proof or illustration, neither necessarily continuous nor necessarily live. 

As the official PechaKucha website finds that a good PechaKucha presentation uncovers “the unexpected, unexpected talent, unexpected ideas”, I cannot but look forward to see the doctorandi at docARTES experimenting with this format. If the timing of the slides turns out to be prohibitive of fluency or efficiency (which may end the infatuation – already variants are popping up), then it will still be excellent for the reasons stated in the second paragraph of this post.

Wagenaar's art of presentation

In 2004 I heard a lecture by Prof. Dr. Albert Wagenaar on how ‘People don’t remember the weather forecast’. This was not the topic but the message. After all these years, every member of the audience that I still meet remembers it - how to achieve this effect was the real topic of Wagenaar’s lecture, which he gave again at the Orpheus Institute last year in front of an audience of doctoral students. 

At the beginning, Wagenaar explained it was not really a lecture, for he wouldn’t read anything. It was going to be more of a ‘causerie’, a ‘talk.’ And that was exactly what he did: for more than a half hour, without accessories such as paper, microphone, seat, blackboard, PC or beamer, he needed only his voice and his visual presence. He is a very sweet-looking man with the type of voice that makes for excellent radio. Like Garrison Keillor, Wagenaar can draw in your attention with his voice alone, never needing to raise it to be articulate, or searching for words, always at ease and in command. For Wagenaar, to be in command of the audience is the main technique to communicate a message. His work as a clinical psychologist (having been, amongst other, a member of the faculty of law at Leiden University and a renown juror-expert in legal trials) has given him ample opportunity to test this thesis, both as the one who talks and the one who studies those who talk. But it is not just a question of the voice. Wagenaar intended his talk to be of help to people who need to present their doctoral research to a live audience, and filled it with techniques that are necessary to make the difference between an aural and a written presentation. 

The entire talk was structured along a list of such techniques, which each one being demonstrated while being explaining. Form and content matched perfectly. Some of the techniques are very basic, e.g. being on time (excepting force majeure) shows you care as much as those in the audience that are on time. Talking directly to your audience allows them to engage with what you say. Other techniques are less self-evident, e.g. "Do not read from paper": it gives the impression you are not fully prepared and every time you need to look at the paper to know where you are, you lose contact with your audience. Do not hand out bunches of photocopies on which only small items are relevant: these will give the audience the chance to loose concentration and shift their focus. If you need PowerPoint, be aware of how much the frames distract audiences, who are looking at them instead of listening to you. Apart from the risk of technical problems, overhead projections of text (especially listings to follow the structure of the talk) are counterproductive. Some techniques are self-evident but not necessarily easy. If you really command your subject, you must be able to say what you have to say in 10 seconds. The rest is illustration to make that point or to keep the attention of the audience. (Wagenaar is a professional expert on the workings of the human memory.) Unlike reading a brief or a novel, an audience of a talk cannot go back to read something again in case it feels it missed or misunderstood something. The attention span does not last for a half hour, and an audience’s attention will most definitely wander and miss bits. Some of those bits can be crucial to the argument and for someone who misses such a point the whole talk may be wasted. It is therefore important to repeat the message and the crucial points. That’s why the message should be announced at the beginning of the talk rather then spending the first minutes (which are at the most profitable point of the attention span) on how you are happy to be here, and how you suppose the audience might appreciate what happened to you yesterday and how that connects to the subject at hand. Repeating the message and closing of with it can be literally impressive, as Wagenaar demonstrated in both of his talks that I witnessed. Wagenaar compared an aural presentation to an onion, with the core being the message, and the layers the illustrations and attention grabbers. A written account can be structured like the unwinding of a cotton-ball, spinning a long thread of logically connected but sequentially arranged arguments. In an aural presentation such a thread will easily and quickly brake apart. At such points, the structure must then be left for another one to repair the damage: going back to previous stages of the argument and explaining the matter again. This may in turn enlarge the disruption of the thread, and only the most experienced ‘talkers’ may pick up where they had been forced to stop. 

A few of the layers that he used to make these very points are worthwhile relaying here. Simulating a search for the right word can put the audience’s attention back on track: the listeners that feel the urge to complete the sentence will provide some relief in the monotonousness of the talk. If one of the members that you know (organiser, colleague, etc.) is drifting away, you may mention his name in some made-up reference. At least that person will be with it again immediately, and the rest will have occasion to turn their heads and see whom it is that the speaker is referring to. Small tricks like this, expertly timed by Wagenaar, revealed to be more effective than one might expect. 

After Wagenaar’s talk, the students were scheduled to give presentations themselves. Of course, not having prepared with any of his advice in mind, their presentations suffered heavily from the comparison. But a comparison between an experienced presenter like Wagenaar and fresh students (who are already accomplished performers but with sounds instead of words) is unfair. It was much more of a surprise to witness a seminar later that day by someone who was a professional researcher, without a doubt used to lecturing, teaching and presenting. It had certainly not been the intention of the organisers to follow up on Wagenaar’s talk with a demonstration of how it should not be done, but to witness a lecture that did not benefit from his experiences was the best way to learn the lesson that he had come to teach.