My First Dance with a Piano

"Piano Dances has been the perfect place for me to be fully me."

Piano Dances was my first project with Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, my first project with Hugh Nankivell and Bob Lockwood and my first professional artistic project.

I have always been an artist, but I am also a pragmatist and so my undergraduate degree was vocational and on completion I had not only my BSc, but also a licence to practice: i.e. a job, a trade, a chance to be ‘set for life’.

I don’t much like the phrase ‘set for life’ as it brings to mind an image of concrete. It starts out fluid, mouldable and responsive but ends up rigid and unyielding.

I have worked hard to find time and ways to be creative in every area of my life, and Piano Dances has been the perfect place for me to be fully me. By this I mean bringing all my passions and skills together: music, children, learning and early years development, communication, adult learning and creativity, pushing the boundaries of what we ‘know’, leaping into where we fear to tread (with support); and my special skill: encouraging and cheering and being delighted.

Invitation to explore and experiment

Explore (verb) to travel extensively in order to know
Experiment (noun) any activity undertaken to make a discovery
(prefix <u>ex </u>from Latin meaning ‘out of’), out of experience and exploration, what?

Piano Dances is an invitation to explore and experiment, to find a new way to play. It provided a chance for adults to be fully engaged in the act of exploration, of finding new ways of playing the piano.

By taking our lead from the early years children at Christ Church Woodhouse, from those who are fully engaged in exploration, we remind ourselves how to explore. We use our senses, we watch, we look, we listen. We touch, we taste and we smell. We use our whole bodies to gauge just exactly what this new thing is in relation to us. We hypothesise and we test. How big is it? How heavy, what’s inside, what’s it made of, what does it feel like, what does it do? Have I ever seen anything like it before, what’s it called? What does it taste like, sound like, feel like? Is it working? Is this all it does?

The Piano Dances team acted like a filter between the children’s spontaneous and active exploration of this new object in their nursery and the adults who attended the workshop. By watching the children closely in real time and on video, we were able to suggest possible questions they might be trying to answer about the piano and to record the methods they were using to find out.

Bringing this to the adult workshops we encouraged the participants to be conscious of these ways of learning and to reconnect with their ‘inner explorer’. Not knowing that there is a predetermined ‘right’ way, invites exploration and creativity. This piano is yours, what do you want to do with it? Work it out as you go.

We copied the children to encourage them to believe that what they were doing was just right. Their systematic and creative enquiry provided the template for the adults to break down any ‘concrete’ ways they approach learning a new skill and to remind us of the need to fully explore in order to fully know.

I want to mention one example of this shift away from the belief that there is a right way to play the piano, which happened in the last workshop. I asked everyone to draw a picture of themselves happy and on the other side to draw a picture of how they feel now.

The adults were then invited to come to the piano and ‘play their picture’. One participant really wanted to play, but prefaced the piece by saying ‘I can’t play’, Hugh simply said, ‘you can play’. By completely committing to the process of playing the picture, a most beautiful piece of music was created. By believing in new ways of playing, new ways of playing exist. We will never hear it again, but I will never forget it.

What will I do next then?

Well, I hope to have a chance to go back with the Piano Dances team to revisit the Early Years group and see how the piano has embedded itself in the routine and opportunities of the nursery.

I have enrolled on a community photographic project and am using what I learned from Piano Dances to explore and experiment and keep an open mind on what the camera might really be.

I have been coming up with questions such as; is the camera a magnifying glass, a mirror, a detective, a calendar?

I have been looking at techniques and approaches, for example, taking photos from lying down, up a ladder, or jumping as I take a picture.

I have been sharing these thoughts with the group members and leaders as they occur to me. Not surprisingly perhaps, they join in and answer the question in their own way and create their own techniques.

I have also been invited to advise on dramaturgy and narrative development for a local theatre company and it appears that as I consider myself to be a professional artist that others do too. And so it appears that by believing in new ways of working, new ways of working exist

By Jacqueline Gaile