Movement in Sound/Sound in Movement: A Musician's Point of View

The paper provides an account of an innovative collaborative work between composer/violinist Elo Masing, choreographer/dancer Jean Lee, and the Kreutzer String Quartet. The project challenges the conventions of music and dance collaboration by proposing a fundamentally new way of working across disciplines, establishing a profound interrelation between movement and sound production. The work so far has mostly involved developing a new notation system for string instruments and dancer suitable for recording the sounds and movements the work in progress will primarily be based on. The paper will, at this stage, demonstrate only a fraction of the various possibilities of this new way of musician–dancer collaboration that is estimated to span over the next couple of years. The idea for the piece dates back to June 2010, when a structured improvisation was created in collaboration between Elo Masing and Jean Lee, commissioned for a conference at Roehampton University. The innovative aspect of the project is manifested in the development of choreography and music together from the very beginning, using new sound and movement languages discovered in interdisciplinary improvisation sessions. In the center of the collaboration lies the definition of the roles of the musician and the dancer as equal, with equally complex compositional material and interchanging ideas. That means composing music and dance simultaneously and letting them influence each other. The new notation system for string instruments focuses on the movements of string players, thus creating a possibility for relating music to dance in a more tangible and visual rather than conceptual and abstract way.