Participant's comments:
"Excellent workshop, lots of playing, lots of learning. A joy!"
"...The box game has definitely changed my conceptions of how to make and experience music...It was cathartic and I feel as though I’ve seen (and heard) a whole different world"
" ...The style and framework allowed for thoughtful springboards / exploration into the work, and then creating something special and challenging as a group. I would like to do more, and particularly work on joint listening exercises"
"What a lovely afternoon"
" I really enjoyed the Out Of The Box workshop. I was fascinated by the different techniques for setting up the conditions of improv...A very enjoyable weekend and time well spent! I’m looking forward using the experience to further my playing and my thinking around improv."
"Sensitively facilitated with some music of real courage! Thank you"
"Great time. Enjoyably open sense of play. Fun, serious, deep and light-hearted"
"I particularly enjoyed playing with the randomness of the dice throw..... a welcoming, generous and open facilitator and this I feel really helped us all to feel safe and get involved despite any reluctance we might have carried into the room with us…I’d definitely be up for playing more..."
"The emphasis was on the 'doing' of improv with no more time than was necessary around the 'verbals', and your collection of tools for unlocking the creative processes within and between us were intriguing as well as effective. I left the session feeling fulfilled, heartened and rather joyful. It was all a real treat!"
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION:
'Out of the Box' is a practical deep dive into free improvisation, for instrumentalists and vocalists, delving into strategies and simple instruction pieces that engage group improvisation, harnessing the use of chance-based approaches like dice & cards as the means to navigate our way through hundreds of ways to play together freely.
Out of The Box is a game through which the participants explore borrowed, original and collected instructions & instigations, brought together over 20+ years. The workshop can take cues from composers (such as La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Webern, and Cornelius Cardew), and can investigate areas such as Search & Reflect and Conduction, as well as adapt to different approaches to 'free' playing taken from our everyday surroundings in an organic and playful way, where the dice, cards, boxes and chance leads what happens next.
Participants gain experience and insight and reflection into their own unconscious approaches to play and listening, affecting and creating the group - as well as finding inspiration in music making and composition along the way.
Playing a game frees the direction and content of the workshop away from a 'leader', or 'teacher', to become an interaction of timings and synchronicity , inner and outer, you and me. The game encourages participants to notice what the present moment brings, and how they react to it. This approach takes the pressure off, and invites the participants to simply trust in what the universe is guiding them to do. 'Out of The Box' aims to make space to develop tools for listening, to help personal creative practice, shake-up stale approaches, or allow new ideas to bubble up, whether those be musical, or otherwise.
The workshop is guided by Hannah, who can explain or clarify the game as it unfolds, if that is what's needed.
Material and resources that inform the game have been generated through experiences performing improvised music in the Uk and abroad, collaborating in theatre, working in education, community music, working with artists and composers, training in western classical music and investigating philosophical/spiritual practices.
Hannah is an experienced and inclusive facilitator, having held many creative spaces with people of all ages and abilities, and has taken workshops is group Improvisation, theatre, music and art & sensory sounds and stories.
For a CV detailing Hannah's past experience and training in teaching and participation please go HERE