'Out of the Box' is a practical 2-day deep dive into free improvisation, for instrumentalists and vocalists. We delve into collected and original strategies and simple 'pieces' that enable group improvisation, using chance as the means to navigate our way through hundreds of approaches to playing.

Exploring graphics, text pieces, simple instructions, numbers, games, rhythm, conduction and movement, as well as completely free playing, participants gain experience and insight into individual and group free improvisation and how they intimately interweave, as well as finding possibilities for inspiration in music making and composition along the way.

Devising a game frees the direction and content of the workshop from a 'leader', or 'teacher', instead inviting the participant's trust in what the game and the universe brings for us to play with, at that moment. This aims to be a useful tool for listening with the whole self, to honour voluntary participation & release the need to control- as a tool to help personal creative practice, shake-up stale approaches to playing, or allow new ideas to bubble up, whether those be musical, or otherwise.

The workshop will be guided by Hannah Marshall who has been playing freely improvised music for many years in the UK and abroad, in small and large groups and solo. Material for the workshop has been gathered, collected and borrowed from her observations and experiences in music, and theatre, as well as taking cues from the works of John Steven's 'search & reflect', Stockhausens 'Aus den Sieben Tagen', La Monte Young, John Cage's texts, Pauline Oliveros, London Improvisors Orchestra's conductions, fluxus pieces and more. The game employs boxes, dice, and cards, containing and indicating parameters, limitations and instigations, to invite the timings and directions of synchronicity and 'chance' into the experience of the workshop.

We are allowed to just go with what happens, exercise our relationships to instruments, voice, rhythm, words and place, become aware of the changes we notice, and meet other people as we do this. Discovering connections to time, coincidence, people, feeling and listening, we will have some idea where we may begin, but where we go and the directions we take, will be unknown.