On the 4th day of CoLab...

...our project gave to us;

• 4 practice rooms
• 3 sharing sections
• 2 new ideas

and no blindfolds for the audience!

Practice rooms hooray!

I hope you tried to read that to the tune of 12 days of Christmas (I know it doesn't work perfectly but please try it!)

Now it's probably more than 4 practice rooms but that's how many we had booked and members of the group were using these to memorise and use the last full day to finalise preparations on the pieces they had been working on.

Following on from Wednesday's organisational work, we considered splitting our sharing session into 3 sections, in order to allow audience members to leave or enter with relative freedom without disturbing the darkness. This ended up as section 1 - blindfold audience, section 2 - total darkness (no blindfolds), section 3 - blindfold musicians. Now we just had the task of creating a programme order including all the pieces so that they fit into 3 roughly equal slots within 45 minutes. 

My two new ideas consisted of trying some things we hadn't yet experienced. As I'm primarily a trumpet player I hadn't found the physical aspect of playing in the dark difficult at all, so I decided to reconnect with my piano playing ability (or distinct lack of) and give it a go to appreciate how much harder the week had been for some people. I must admit, that definitely gave me a taster of their challenges! In addition, I wanted to find out how it would be to learn a new piece from scratch without being able to see. This idea was inspired by my Grandma as she has been completely blind for over 50 years yet started learning the piano at age 75, with no sight. She mainly learnt hymns as that was the sort of music she already had an ear for and enjoyed. However, after having only sung them for most of her life, applying that knowledge to the piano is learning a new skill! Rachel had a go a teaching me a simple blues style piece involving chords. The main challenges I experienced were finding the starting notes (it's very difficult to distinguish the sets of 2 or 3 black notes without being able to see them) and actually memorising the music. Because I hadn't seen the sheet music or watched anyone's hand positions I really struggled as I'm generally a visual learner. Here's me attempting a bit of the piece I was taught by Rachel;

Unfortunately Karl hadn't found anyone that could deliver blindfolds to us by Friday but luckily Sandrine found some so we were still able to do all 3 sections providing the CoLab crew had enough material to black out the windows in our performance space!

Not long until performance time now and it's nearly the weekend!

S x