To present the 2009 – 2010 program, the Heure Bleue, one of the city’s theater and music organisms has organises an “open market” presentation tomorrow at 18h00. For around 45 min. the public is invited to browse among the theaters chairs where all 36 projects will have their own information display spread out on the ground floor.
Meanwhile on the balcony, yours truly was invited by Bill to join him and friends Sylvie, Miriam and Thomas for a tonatem time session. Bill having been asked to create some “interesting easy listening background music” to accompany this event has written four poly-rhythmic pieces that we will be playing. Each one has a percussion pillar (I’m freely translating from French here) with four tonatems playing along; I will be playing the washboard on “Steve’s 96”.
It will be fun to see how this goes, we’ve practiced a few times in the empty theater and since we are all spread out to create some spacial interest, it’s not that easy to hear one another. And since we are not suppose to call too much attention to ourselves, the balcony lights will be off so visual information is not an option. Tomorrow there will be a couple of hundred folks chatting down there…
This has been a good practice for me, since I had to learn how to follow a partition which even if tonatems are very simple one stringed instruments had a few rhythmic twists.
If I can get a recording, I’ll post some of it here…