Katy Hamilton

One of the many reasons why I’m continually delighted by my freelance existence is the capacity it affords me to try new things. Usually (unless a would-be employer is feeling particularly kamikaze) the ‘new thing’ is in some way connected with a skill-set or knowledge basis that I already have: for example, an invitation to give a detailed talk on a subject I don’t yet know everything about, but which is connected with music history and thus liable to be within my capacity. In that instance, the joy comes both from learning about something new, and also uncovering the potential challenges and pitfalls of that area of research. Last week, I had the rather rarer opportunity of taking a practical skill – conducting – and applying it to an entirely new scenario. Because last week I conducted a dance performance.

The first thing to say is that dancers and musicians, entirely unsurprisingly, don’t really seem to think alike. You don’t have to be able to decipher orchestral scores to dance and you don’t, thank heavens, need to be able to execute a flawless grand jeté in order to be able to play or direct music. So the first big challenge of working with dancers is finding a satisfactory shared vocabulary. As my dance colleagues quickly realised, trying to prompt me to a particular point by turning gracefully and saying ‘the bit where I do this’ when I was already attempting to follow my own score and make eye contact with my little band of musicians was not liable to be very successful. But the one thing that did work, and which they set about doing so admirably, was singing the fragment in question whilst carrying out the move. We all need to hear the music in our heads, after all. So that was the question of communication solved.

And then there was the work itself, a beautiful choreography by Robert Cohan (and we were lucky enough to have Bob sitting in on one of the early rehearsals and the performance) of Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater. The performing forces are nice and compact: string quartet, continuo keyboard and solo alto. And really, if there had not been the question of overlaying the dance, the musicians would have been able to carry this off perfectly well without my arm-waving in front of them. I was, effectively, a sort of air traffic control to keep everyone together.

So here was my own set of challenges and pitfalls. They might all sound fairly simple, but I found each deserving of thought, practice, and time, and being the sort of person who really loves unpicking tasks until they break down into a series of things to solve, the whole process appealed to me hugely. Some are not specific to a dance/music scenario, but that doesn’t, I think, make them any less interesting.

First up was tempo. This was an all-consuming problem. Vivaldi having been dead for quite some time, he was not around to advise. Bob produced his choreography in the 1970s, when Vivaldi was played rather differently from what we now tend to hear. The musicians were almost all born post-1970 (myself included) and thus torn between going back to a performance style derived shortly before they were born, or a performance style derived centuries before they were born which is more ‘musically accurate’ but which we can reproduce far less faithfully. The dancers were learning the steps so needed us to start slower and then get faster as rehearsal time passed… ultimately reaching a tempo not so fast that it was undanceable, but no so slow that they were required to defy gravity.

Did I mention this piece is in nine movements? Now you see why tempo was such an issue. And of course, it’s not just the job of getting the tempo right per movement, it’s also about the move from one tempo to the next between movements.

Which brings me to the second thing. Gaps between movements. In a concert performance, we might wait a moment before moving on, ensuring everyone playing and singing was happy before continuing. But the dance was the crucial thing here, and in some cases movements had to begin – that is, the downbeat had to land – on specific gestures from the dancers. A run across the stage. A sweeping movement of the arm. So air traffic control had to both set everyone going at the right tempo and set everyone going in the right place, nine times.

The third thing is related to the first two: we performed the Vivaldi in the middle of the second half of an evening programme around 2 hours in length. So the ability to focus quickly and remember exactly the right tempo, gesture, etc. at the right time became even more crucial.

And then we get to all the things you’d expect anyway: phrasing and dynamics, making sure the singer had time to breathe, clarity of texture, and so on. Except even these things were not removed from the stage activity. Sometimes the choreography demanded a shape, breath or general flexibility which, without the presence of dancers, the musicians simply would not have thought to carry out. The entire process, in other words, was one of negotiation.

The whole thing was a great adventure and all the performers involved – musicians and dancers – did brilliantly. (And I can only conclude from the fact that we all kept going that I didn’t do anything actively unhelpful, at least.) It also taught all of us something, I think. The musicians (and I most certainly include myself in this) learned what it is to have to hold something ‘higher’ in their brains than their own performative conception of a work. There was no Stabat Mater divorced from the choreography: the Stabat Mater as it existed on Wednesday was a dance piece, nothing more and nothing less. The dancers learned that live musicians are not recordings and need time, cues and prompts in a different kind of way – and also that it might not always sound identical at every play-through. The negotiation of these two approaches, via Vivaldi’s score and Bob’s choreography was what made the performance. It was a profoundly moving and extremely thought-provoking process with which to be involved. I can only hope that one day, I might get to do something like this again. After all, there’s nothing like building on one adventure by having another.