Harmonized Minds

– A sentiment for the third round of Music Colloquium

On October 23, our teachers invited Alex Cheung (張藝生) to our class. He showed us many modern theaters which were directed by him and led us to play a trust-building game in small groups. After the class, we had another workshop to experiment with physical interaction which includes sound improvisations. All those are good experiences for us. Actually, through those practices, we have had harmonized minds because of the concentration and interaction by each other.

Just as contemporary music, modern theater comes much differently from the classical drama. The new dramaturgy contains "liveness, participation, improvisation, legitimation, and manifest will" (Hilton 1993: 11). It is found there are indeed something in Alex’s works, especially the participation and the improvisation. For example, in one theater which he had shown us, there had been a dog lying aside. The dog can perform whatever it wanted to do notwithstanding the script had been fixed. In this way, Alex still added improvisation elements into the theater. The dog actually charmed the audience, and therefore we heard some laughs surrounding.

"Drama is a medium in which one group of bodies watches another group of bodies. The theater is a place that exhibits what a human body is, what it does, what it is capable of. It requires special things of bodies, putting pressure on its audience as well as its performers. It creates and manipulates pleasure in relation to bodies." (Shepherd 2006: preface) We saw several plays without any sentence presented by Alex. Their theatric tensions were mostly built on body movements and facial expressions. "Negotiation around bodies is important, I think, because many ideas about what is good, right, natural and possible are grounded in assumptions about what the body is, what it needs how it works. Social, moral and political values attach themselves to body shape, size colour, movement. They also inhabit distinctions made between body and non-body, whether that be mind, spirit, object or society." (Shepherd 2006: 1) While playing musical instruments, performances, especially the conductor, needs such negotiations to interact and even integrate with each other.

During the workshop, we were grouped into a big team, and all of us should imitate the chosen leader’s actions. Next game, two persons formed a group, and one should response the other’s sound instructions by body movements with closed eyes. Both games tested our potential for hearing dedication and body expression. I was lucky to catch Alex’s attention because I have learned some fundamentals of martial art. I thought it can improve the ability to present our body movements under the inner will and had felt the benefit when I learning orchestral conduction at undergraduate school.

The final game, Alex let us to use one musical instrument which not must be the one we were already familiar with. When some ones played, the others went into a delimited circle with empty hands and acted their body. This time was a huge interaction between all players. Hence there were many sound and body-movement materials which had to be controlled. To be obvious, we messed it up sometimes since all of us did not have enough unspoken consensuses, lacked the skill to listen and understand, and fell short of the drill to organize the sounds we made in a cerebral way.

As William Benzon explained, "The phenomenon of synchrony observed in fireflies and other organisms may play an important role in the social coordination and trust-building behaviors that are still observed in religious and social musical and dancing rituals. Working together in coordinated activity is enabled by the uniquely human use of language, and may have been key to its evolution – and music may have been a precursor to complex language behavior. Making music together involves close listening and modeling of the activities of others, setting up internal neural resonances and mental models that can serve as the fundamental processes for building up more complex and instrumental social interactions. The use of the human body as a musical instrument and for performing music with external instruments – may be an important and largely unexplored key to the evolution and maintenance of complex social behavior." (Benzon 2002) I think it is evidenced more obviously when we play the trust-building or the interactive games under Alex’s guide because we not only need to trust other classmates and receive complex messages from them but also must send out some actions to response, vice versa. Although we still could not handle the process cleverly, we did accomplish some part of it. When the concentration we taking, the other key point Alex has tried to train us, are efficiently enough, we have harmonized minds which are very important for such players of performance arts.

References
Benzon, William. Beethoven's Anvil: music in mind and culture. Perseus Books Group, 2002.
Hilton, Julian. New Directions in Theatre. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1993.
Shepherd, Simon. Theatre, Body and Pleasure. Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2006.