PLAY AND INTERPLAY: MODELLING PARAMETERS OF INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION OF MUSIC AND VISUAL ARTS

Abstract

This collaborative project brings together artistic expression of musical performance with painting, building both one-way and two-way connections between the art forms, with video recordings emerging not just as documentation, but creative products in its own right. 

The project has had three iterations, or “episodes”, thus far; each expands the parameters of the collaboration. Music began as half preset with solo works of J.S. Bach and eventually became purely improvised interplay between two musicians. Videography began with the intent of recording the event and eventually became live projection and an active element in the performance. The first episode was under pandemic restrictions, the second included an audience, and the third was a three-day event comprising exhibition, workshop, and performance — and the expansion of the team to include a new musician and an assistant to the videographer. 

Throughout this experimental engagement now in its third year, our mission was to explore interdisciplinary crossroads: how do people from different art forms collaborate? Does this collaboration bring out creativity or expressiveness or both that would not be the case with each art form in isolation? How does the performative element and the inclusion of audiences influence the painting or the music or the way these interact? 

In some ways, we find more questions than answers, but even so there is value in knowing which new questions to explore. In other ways, we create a model of interdisciplinary engagements of this nature, to visualise some parameters within which artists, performers, and audiences find play and interplay: as the title of the project suggests, a Garden of Sight, Sound, and Surprise.