On seeing a glass installation by Keiko Mukaide at Aberdeen Art Gallery, I was so instantly struck by the fragile beauty of the work and the imagery and world that it conjured up that I knew I wanted to work with something similar in a performance setting. Upon visiting Keiko at Edinburgh College of Art I discovered that glass blowing was also a theatrical spectacle in itself.  Amidst the roar and heat of the kilns, the molten mass is swung, pulled, turned and blown to create the form. This intensely physical process has much in common with that used by dancers, who also work with gravity, motion, breath and effort.

The conjuring up of other worlds is also reflected in the mythical story of Undine by Friedrich De La Motte Fouque, images from which are threaded through One Crowded Hour. First published in 1811 this piece of romantic literature tells of a water nymph who in order to attain a soul and rise to a higher existence, must leave her watery world and live on land so as to marry a mortal. In doing so she finds that she belongs to neither place with ease. My interest was not in telling the story per se, but to create a poetic interpretation that invokes some of the elemental imagery and the sense of different world . The prose poem Ondine by the late nineteenth century French poet, Aloysius Bertrand, which itself is an interpretation of the story, inspired much of the initial movement material.

One of the major artistic goals of One Crowded Hour was to create a performance where the music, dance and design could interact equally within a shared space. Glass has many qualities but the one I chose to work with choreographically and as the process for this collaboration was that of reflection as it encouraged every ingredient within the performance to be influenced by or to influence another aspect.  Whenever possible, myself, the dancers, the designer, composer and musicians, all worked together in the rehearsal studio, giving each of us the chance to be inspired by the others work. Out of this process we could create a performance where the dancers and the musicians move between fixed and interpretative elements.  It has been a real privilege to be able to work with the musical ensemble that Ecat brought together for this project and I hope the lively creative interchange it stimulated between the dancers and the musicians is reflected in One Crowded Hour.

Music for Dancing
Peter Nelson, Composer

“When the cannibals had eaten the white ox, they ran after Hlakanyanna. They caught up to him near a big stone. He jumped on the stone and sang this song:
I went to hear the news
About rain from the girls
The cannibals couldn’t resist dancing when they heard the song, so he was able to run away while the stone continued to sing the song for him.”

This story is of a different type and from a different tradition, to the story of Ondine which is the background to One Crowded Hour. But it represents for me the inseparable twinning of music and dancing. Music makes us dance, even if it is the internal, politely straitjacketed motion of the tapping foot – and equally, and opposite, it makes us still. Much of my recent music has concerned itself with these opposites, and with the rhythmic and structural properties of music from the African traditions, which still have, for us westerners, an  iconic and inseparable relationship to the dance. In A Bush of Ghosts for brass ensemble, I used a film by André Gide, dating from the 1920’s, of a West African horn ensemble dancing an intricate spiral as they played.

In One Crowded Hour, the influence is more in a method of working, with dancers and musicians, in a closely improvised and alternating way which tries to make the most of this synergy of sound and motion. The musical materials also include some vocal techniques from Inuit music, and the resonances of Keiko Mukaide’s beautiful glass bowls. The voice is the song that is at the heart of the music ;the bass is its beat; and the Macintosh laptop is the stone which, miraculously, sings by itself.

A world of glass                   
Keiko Mukaide, Visual Artist

My work frequently refers to the Japanese garden with many of my ideas concentrating on the purity and simplicity of nature: water, earth, rock, light through a palette of glass materials. I love the versatility of glass. It can express itself in so many different forms and textures. No material can metamorphose like it.

Glass has some sort of limit for the stage because of its fragility, so sheets of clear plastic were used for the set instead. When put together in the way of a fishing net floating around and above the stage, they give that fantastic feeling of being submerged by water, allowing both dancers and musicians to move around as if at the bottom of a lake.
The glass bowls are both visual and musical instruments. The world looks really magical when seen through glass and the sound that comes out as a finger goes round the edge helps create various atmospheres depending on the size of each bowl, filling the space with cries of invisible spirits.

This is my first experience working with choreography and music and it has been wonderful. Claire explained to me how she wanted to create a world between two worlds – like a land between earth and water – and as the dance, the music and the glass came together in the studio, it was very exciting to see and hear it all suddenly make sense!