A musical experience at the origin of SLOGANS

Once, I was in charge of sound for a Butoh festival in Russia. There was a large group of Japanese dancers and a large group of Russian. The general differences in approach between the two groups was very dramatically on display. The evenings would take the form of solos by the senior dancers followed by a huge mash up of five minute scenes involving every performer in solos and groups. I noticed that there was a profound general difference between the way the Russians used and responded to music and the way the Japanese dancers did. For the Russian dancers, music was largely a question of colour and rhythmical change. You can change direction with it and create immediate shifts of movement and feeling, usually in a a line building through time. For the Japanese dancers, in contrast, music provided a form in time. You could wait for the formal sections of the music to be audible as they shift, and you can follow or ignore these changes regardless of the immediate colour or rhythm of the music.

One Russian dancer had a scene where he was receiving letters. At the climax, he put on an extremely well know Russian classical piece, and all of the scenery at the back of the stage started being raised and lowered in time. The audience found this sudden joke charming and funny. As soon as the (rather good) joke had been told in the music, we didn’t really need it any more. And in fact it became, in a formal sense, not very useful, and was replaced by the next block of colour, the next bit of music.

A Japanese dancer gave me a twelve minute piece of music to play during the last scene of his solo, and with no changes. For the first five minutes, he walked around the stage doing almost nothing, to the point that you were quite worried for him, as if something were wrong. Then as the music shifted, it began so seem as if his very clothing was moving underneath the music in a constant groove. At that moment the audience became hypnotised and was thrown into a weird kind of ecstasy for the last seven minutes of his piece. This change would not have been possible unless he had taken the first five minutes to all but humiliate himself.

This idea of form in music is very important to SLOGANS. Because performers may anticipate the formal sections – for instance, if you put on a pop song, you know that at some point there will probably be a chorus, if you put on a techno track, you know that the kick drum will drop in and drop out – and that these anticipations make a kind of magnetism for those points where the unconscious of the show – those moments we are waiting for – emerge.