In November, just like last year, a collaboration between the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and the Academy of Theatre and Dance took place. During an exchange week students of the study courses Composition, Master Live Electronics, Composition/Arranging, AEMA, Pop, and SNDO – Choreography work together. Teachers involved in this project week are Jorrit Tamminga (CvA), Thanasis Deligiannis (CvA) and Bruno Listopad (SNDO – Choreography).
We asked Bruno, some questions about this special collaboration between the academies.
What is the objective of this collaboration?
The collaboration is intended to enable students of CvA and SNDO to become acquainted with each other’s ways of ideating, conceiving, and practically developing artistically within their respective disciplines. These are two autonomous artistic fields that have historically been closely related and have converged experimentally in multiple ways. The overall aim is to prompt reflection upon this longstanding dialogue and explore the potential of renewing critically such creative entanglement to conceive artistic work of today and tomorrow. The exchange is moderated by Thanasis Deligiannis, who is present to guide the students, moderate discussions, and ensure that the encounter between the disciplines is sound and productive for all involved.
How does the collaboration function? Will it lead to a presentation, or is it experimental research?
It is primarily an experimental collaboration. It leads to short presentations within the exchange week itself, but also potentially to future collaborations. That is, projects conceived and initiated by students after the workshop. Throughout the exchange week, students present their practices to one another, share them discursively and practically, explore their work ecosystems, and compose/improvise together. They can experiment hands-on with the complexities of the disciplines that may be more or less familiar to them, discovering what it means to think and create from a different medium, perspective, or set of principles. Students venture into each other’s practices conceptually, compositionally, but also somatically and performatively. As mentioned, this exchange has often led to further artistic collaborations. Since it began, SNDO festivals have featured joint projects between the students of the two departments. This tendency has been steadily growing.
What does it consist of?
This exchange is mostly centered around dialogue and practice, specifically in the encounter of embodied movement and sound composition. Students present their very individual practices to one another and learn from each other’s perspectives, habitual and experimental working models, techniques, and visions. They also have the chance to discover how these practices relate to their own embodiment, positionality, and the emerging or chosen forms their bodies operate in. As mentioned, this is done both discursively and practically, the latter, for instance, through improvised kinetic/sonic experiments in two dance studios allocated for them. This collaboration will mostly take place at ATD. However, SNDO will also have one session at CvA where SNDO students will be able to attend rehearsals and later present their findings and proposals —related to the interplay between movement and sound— at the "New Music Arena" (NMA), a new CvA venue dedicated to testing and experimenting with content and form.
What are the challenges within this collaboration?
The students work across different disciplines and have at least two educational backgrounds. In addition to that, within their chosen field, they each have distinctive practices. This can make it challenging to understand and attune to each other’s ways of conceiving and practicing. However, becoming aware of these gaps —the ones between mediums, approaches, and idiosyncratic relations to practice— and navigating the difficulty of translating one's artistic language for another discipline is part of the learning process.
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Quotes by curator and moderator of the exchange week Thanasis Deligiannis (CvA’s Composition Department):
“In this collaboration the students work every day (Monday-Friday), in discussions, workshop time and excursions. They work in both the buildings (ATD/SNDO and the CvA). Jorrit Tamminga and Thanasis Deligiannis (CvA), and Bruno Listopad (SDNO) are putting together the two teams of students, with Thanasis moderating the project week, co-shaping the day-by-day schedule together with the students, guiding them through discussions, exercises, improvisation sessions and excursions.”
“The students spend time in understanding each other’s points of reference, background and practice, through a set of roundtables, as well as through their own bodies and creative tools (such as musical equipment). They both experiment with compositional aspects in space and time, both through observation, as well as embodiment. The project week is designed not to lead to an artistic result, but to be a meeting ground for fertile exchange.”
Quote by teacher of the exchange week Jorit Tamminga (CvA):
“The main idea is that the two groups of students (CvA and SNDO year 2) get to know each other, including their way of creating. Ideally this will lead to a creative partnerships after this project week, which also happened after the previous episodes.”
