Day 2 - Tuesday

We've been back to work for a second day and making some interesting discoveries! Playing in the dark is quite fun actually and provides some amusing photos too (when you're able to see to take a picture of course). After 2 hours of morning practice in our small ensembles/pairs, we had a large group sharing session where we discussed what we had been working on and how we found the whole concept of playing in the dark. Here are some of the main points I took note of:

• Some people felt vulnerable or nervous when they couldn't see (using blindfolds) - knowing there's an audience there who can see you. Personally I feel less nervous as I am able to forget about the audience and find I listen more to myself and the other performers without the visual conflict messing up my focus.
• Simple things such as picking up the instrument the right way round and when tuning it, not being able to see requires you to feel how much the slide needs to move (trumpet) or whether all the parts are in line (flute), proving how often we rely on our sight!
• When playing the piece from memory for the first few times, there are bound to be mistakes. Usually, in a sighted situation, at the first mistake I'd look back to the sheet music and correct myself, however I found that because I couldn't see there was no point stopping so I found it easier to just keep going and I believe this encourages the ear to correct mistakes itself.

A discussion about the audience experience also gave us some things to consider. We could position the members of the audience around the room or facing a different direction to the conventional method. Maybe it would be fun to be sat listening to a performance in the dark surrounded by musicians, what do you think you'd enjoy? Equally we came up with some slightly more "creepy" ideas, such as testing their other senses - blowing a fan in their face, giving them something with a strange texture to hold, or producing a specific smell in the room - in order to generate a particular atmosphere.

Other aspects such as knowing that the audience can't see who it is performing caused us to wonder what they might think about instead. Will they conjure up an imaginary person or will they really engage with the music and actually think about an image linked to emotions depicted by the music? In my case, knowing the audience don't know it's me playing put me even more at ease as I could be anyone to them and there is no judgement on race, gender, what you're wearing, how nervous or confident you appear etc.

With the pieces I had been playing, I found it fairly easy to stay in time and come in together with the other musicians as the tempo generally indicated where to enter. I wanted to experiment further however as there must be something that provides more difficulty in the dark. Blake and Rachael cooperated with my curiosity and here's some of the experiment;

The aim was to play chords together, with the new chord signified by one person playing a single note after which they both changed chords. However, the gap between playing one note and the next chord was not always the same due to the lack of tempo so they began to listen to each other's breathing in order to communicate more effectively.

And that's about where we're at after 2 days, wonder what we'll get up to on Wednesday - half way point coming up!

S x