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What does dance sound like?
Have you ever asked yourself this question? To me thinking about it opened up a new door.
As a dance writer I was primarily thinking about dance in visual images, and dance to me has always been a visual art before anything else. While writing about dance I am using text in order to describe dance in its many aspects, I try to visualize it with words, and images or promo videos published along side the text somehow fill in the gaps.
I used to think that doing a TV or video feature on dance was a complex job, which technically it is, but communicating dance with sound only is a demanding task in a sense that you don’t have visual info to rely on to fill in those gaps you make as a writer. You’re on your own there. Actually it’s you and your sound recorder. This is something my dance writing colleagues from Croatian Radio, Katja Šimunić and Katarina Kolega have already mastered in, and I’m thinking about suggesting them to do a workshop in Zagreb for other dance writers.
As part of my individual mobility choice in the Communicating Dance project I’ve spent a few days in the Italian Bassano del Grappa (CSC Grage Nardini) participating in an inspiring workshop held by the BBC radio reporter Dany Mitzman. Here I’ve started to learn about how to translate dance experience into sound which I’ve never had a chance to do before, together with four other new sound-editing-dance fans Rita Borga, Sebastiano Crestani, Giulia Galvan and Anna Trevisan.
We started thinking in sound bites and about soundscapes, and started to hear better in general. We started noticing the tiniest sounds surrounding us. I took a radio journalism class in college but as everything in Croatian education – it was all history and theory, no practical learning opportunities. Dany introduced us to some tips&tricks of preparing and making radio features and we all have tried to apply it to dance. So we created our own first radio feature about a very interesting and important project happening in Bassano – Dance with Parkinson which you can listen to here:
People’s habits in receiving information have so much to do with multimedia today and some content is better articulated through images, video and sound then through text. So knowing how to use different media and channels of communication is important as much as knowing how to write.
I had a lot of interesting conversations with dance artists which I regret not to have recorded, and even more which I wanted to make but couldn’t find the time to transcribe them into text for publication, especially during festivals which are packed with content. I find that doing and audio recording of an interview and knowing a few tricks in sound editing could help in speeding up the time of publishing an interview, and even more in helping to get the message out there, than when writing a bunch of text. Of course, sound editing is an art in itself and it takes years of practice to be good at it, but one needs to start somewhere.
The Bassano workshop also got me thinking about two other ideas. First is creating new dance audiences – for example people with seeing problems could be informed about dance through sound. The second and more complex idea is the critical approach to visual culture.
This was triggered in my mind a few months before when I was following the German Dance Platform as part of Communicating Dance project and doing a video interview with Richard Siegal. His piece The Black Swan intentionally darkens the stage so the audience concentrates on the sounds created by the performer. The ideal review of this piece would be making an audio feature about it. This way the ideas from the piece would be communicated in the right way, becoming a part of the piece in itself.
To go back to the beginning, the Bassano workshop made me more aware about yet again another possibility of dance apart from its visual language, its possibility to critically address the visual pollution of today’s communication.
Radio feature credits:
Journalists and Editors: Rita Borga, Sebastiano Crestani, Giulia Galvan, Jelena Mihelcic, Anna Trevisan
Dubbing: Sebastiano Crestani, Giulia Galvan, Jelena Mihelcic, Manuel Roque and Alessandro Sciarroni
Mixing: Jelena Mihelcic
The feature was made during the workshop Communicating Dance Without Visual Support held by the BBC journalist Dany Mitzman at the CSC Garage Nardini in Bassano del Grappa, Italy, June 27-June 30 2014
