Gelsenkirchener Musiktheaterwerkstatt: Mitwirkende Kinder, »Baumgesicht«, »Alien aus der Wand«, Sampler (© HIATUS)
Over five days in October, HIATUS worked with groups of children from Bremen and Gelsenkirchen to develop “sound-image ideas”. Designed as independent, self-contained events, these workshops now serve in a second step to select and recruit three children from each of the cities who will then also be at the centre of the performance of “Fundstadt”. According to the HIATUS method, finding and inventing sounds is closely linked to the visual and pictorial, specifically at the MiR to a “finding of faces”. Here HIATUS document their work process in Gelsenkirchen:
“We enter the field with the following question: In what form can we make the possibilities of music available as a space for working and experimenting?
And with this, the first co-composition methods with children become concrete. In the workshop, the children’s research begins with three focal points:
- Looking inwards to one’s own perceptions, memories, dreams.
- Perceiving other players.
- Grasping the environment in public space.
At the end of the workshop week, the performances of our “Wesenslieder” will take place at different locations around the MiR, bringing these three aspects together in the form of a sound performance. This is what the “Pareidolie Game” leads to, a process laid out over two days. In the first step, the children go out and find “faces” of beings in buildings, trees, traffic signs, etc. in public space. At these places they make sound recordings that capture the ambient sounds and some site-specific conspicuous sounds. In addition, each child plays the “creature location” like an instrument (e.g. scratching in the gravel, knocking on the garage door, etc.). With all these recordings, we build a sampler instrument for each being: each time a key is pressed on a small piano keyboard, a different sound is heard.
Our common starting point of finding “faces of beings” in public space and then giving them expression through sounds led the children to the possibility of experimenting with a sampler and combining their own recordings as building blocks to create “instant compositions”.
On the last day, the children perform with the sampler on their “beings”. We experience different performances:
- A concert with an audience.
- A duet between sampler sounds and another child responding with live sounds.
- The performance of a theatrical improvisation task that lets the children interact with the surrounding space.”
