Restructuring Jam Sessions

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

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.

Voice Sourcing

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:

An Exploration of Hamlet

At our March 16 jam session, 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.