Towards a poetics of restriction
Jung In Jung
​
PhD in Music and Music Technology
Centre for Research in New Music
University of Huddersfield
jungin.j@gmail.com
2.4.2. Queen of the Night
Video 2.35: Queen of the Night
[64] The uncut version of improvisation is included in Appendix J.
[65] This is from the moment where Laban met the Queen of the Night at a courtyard outside of a theatre. Before he got to know the high-class lady he saw an opera singer. When he met the high-class lady, Laban overlapped the presence of the opera singer’s glamorous look towards the high-class lady (Laban, 1975: 32).
Video 2.36: Improvisation with Doepfer A-100 Analog Modular System.
Queen of the Night (Video 2.35) is a dance film I created as an extra-study of The Music Room. Unlike my previous interactive compositions, I filmed the choreography created by my collaborating dancer Foti and composed sound in post-production. I wanted to challenge my usual method of sound composition for choreography.
The piece was inspired by another Laban’s text, “The Night”, in A Life For Dance. In this story the “Queen of the Night” was used as a metaphor for moments when he felt a contradiction between his view of art and the art produced for the capitalistic world. Most often, he uses it in reference to a high-class woman whom he met when he first moved to Munich to make his artistic dreams come true. Laban sought help to start his career in this new place, and a distant uncle who was a well-known poet introduced him to this woman as she had a lot of connections in the theatre world. At first she seemed to understand Laban’s ideas but soon he saw her true side. She laughed at Laban’s work and advised him to wake up from his “fairy tales” as he was not interested in the business of entertainment (Laban, 1975: 39). One day later, Laban also encountered the extreme difference between the rich and the poor in the big city when he met the shop-girl at his uncle’s company, living in a district covered with coal dust. As a consequence, he created the piece The Night as a satire towards the bourgeoisie.
In this story, I was particularly interested in how Laban observed the movement and sound of people at the table where he met the woman for the first time:
Her long slender arm was fashionably covered with dark gloves reaching above the elbow and I could not help comparing her with my old friends in the land of adventure, the graceful, beautiful vipers – banal as this may sound. The men surrounding her competed in saying or doing something exceptional. They obviously wanted to draw the exclusive attention of the Queen of the Night to themselves. One of them would stare into a corner with exemplary stupidity; another would automatically adopt a new pose every half minute – movement habits in those days were quite different from the ones to-day, a third would utter nothing but short unfinished sentences, substituting an elegant gesture of the hand for the unspoken ending; and the fourth – my fashionable poet – chattered on and on although nobody was listening. I sat there like the fifth wheel of the triumphal coach of the goddess and felt most uncomfortable. She looked out above our heads and smiled vaguely at the various group of people who were stirring their teacups with an air of profundity, their little fingers affectedly crooked. Afterwards I felt as if nobody had spoken a single word of sense during the whole three-quarters of an hour of our visit. During this time I was also introduced to a number of people of both sexes, all politely grinning, but my fashionable poet took my arm and indicated that it was time to leave. I was given a slender viper-hand for a good-bye. (Laban, 1975: 33–34)
I wanted to recreate this scene, not as a representation of the story, but by taking the feeling of the situation. I shared the story with Foti and planned to shoot the film around sunset to capture the natural dim daylight.
Figure 2.45: Improvisation in kinesphere in 360°, 180°, and 90° degrees.
As an extension of my study of kinesphere, I asked Foti first to improvise in a free space without any obstruction, and then improvise against a wall and in the corner of a room as I had in The Music Room. The idea was to cut the 360° kinesphere into 180° and 90° and see how these spaces affect the choreography (Figure 2.45). [64] It was also my interpretation of the story “The Night”, as Laban described how much he struggled the more he got to know the high class woman and the people around her. Foti suggested improvising as if there were some cables restricting her body. Initially, she was going to improvise three different acts in each space. However, I asked her to repeat the first improvisation she had made in the free space in the other spaces at the same pace. For example, if she could do a full swing with her arm in the free space, she could swing it only half in the 180° space. And when she touched the wall, she had to wait the same amount of the time that she would have spent on the full swing. Then, she could move onto the next movement. This created intervals between her movements that depended on the space itself. In other words, the space organised her movements, similar to the role of my choreographic task in The Music Room.
It was a challenge for me to compose for the already filmed work as it was not usual for me to create sound for captured choreography. Also, choreography was composed to music traditionally, but not vice versa. For The Night, Laban used “a caricature of jazz” which made “gruesome” sound (Laban, 1975: 45). Interestingly, according to Lisa Ullmann’s annotation (Laban, 1975: 45) the music was composed by Erich Ytar Kahm “following Laban’s notation of the rhythms and metres bar by bar”. This means that Laban created choreography first and then Kahn composed music for it after. I was curious whether this way would work for me too.
When I finished editing the film, it already sounded complete with the recorded location sound. Just the sound of breath and dragging feet on the floor, and stepping hands on the walls sounded enough. I therefore decided to mute the location sound and compose a soundtrack only watching the movement. For me, the table scene quoted above reminded me of the Mad Hatter’s tea party as it became in the end a nightmare for Laban. I therefore wanted to start the composition with soft and elegant sounds as if Laban was revealing the mysterious and graceful goddess figure of the Queen of the Night under the moonlight for the first time. [65] Then I wanted to gradually develop the sound into a crazy table scene at which everybody was pretentiously talking nonstop while stirring their tea cups.
Initially, I wanted to create this piece as the second part of the composition for The Music Room. As a continuation I therefore wanted to use musical instruments for sound materials again, and, as a consequence, I used viola, prepared piano and flute. I then wanted to create some beats as Foti hit the walls with her feet and hands the more the space got narrower.
In the meantime, I was also exploring the analog sound module Doepfer (Video 2.36). One day I thought about how the beat created with the module was similar to how the choreography was created in Queen of the Night. Just as a constant low frequency alternated with another higher frequency pulse, so was the choreography with the walls created with intervals. Therefore, I decided to add the beats played by Doepfer to increase the tension in the piece as though a modern version of the Mad Hatter’s tea party.
After I had finished the sound composition, it did not feel right to present the film without the sound of movement recorded on location. In my previous works I had intentionally removed sound from the location because I did not want to distract the audience with sounds other than the sound composition created with my interactive synthesis and the dancers’ movement. However, the choreography here had an intimate relationship with the space, and I decided to include the location sound. I also synchronised the sound with the movement throughout, but I felt there was no specific purpose for the synchronisation, which in fact just sounded banal. As a consequence, I rearranged my sound composition all over again to interplay with the sound of breath, feet, and hands. Although the location sound also captured some sounds of people passing by and the sound of an electric meter clock, I tried to include them as part of my sound composition too.