Saturday, 16 February 2013

ZARIBA - 16th February from 4pm

ZARIBA - SATURDAY 16th February at Hundred Years Galley, 13 Pearson Street, London E2  8JD - Free Entry - The second DRON Festival performance session features the anarchic Bristol Improvisers’ ZARIBA occupying Hundred Years Gallery for a continulous six hour process of music, dance and live art. Personnel on this occassion are Johanna Fellner - dance, VV - dance and voice, David grundy - laptop, recorder and  percussion, Mark Anthony Whiteford - laptop, voice, tapes, percussion, painting

Some Context - by Mark Anthony Whiteford:

The Bristol Brighton and Cheltenham Improviser's Zariba was instigated by Mark Anthony Whiteford aka M.A. Yfor? 

It was set up in order to explore free improvisation away from the confines and defining limitations of the typical us/european performance straight jacket in which a number of people arrive in a performance space, play a 'piece' which will possibly/probably have nothing to do with how these people feel or what they are thinking. At the end the audience will clap. Or, in most instances, the audience will clap when things go quiet and that will be the end of the 'piece.' People will then go to the bar and behave pretty much as though nothing just happened and the performers will be left to pack up and carry on as though nothing just happened. And maybe, very often, nothing did happen. Another thing I always found strange was the way musicians would never speak to each other during a piece, or if they did so they'd whisper as though speaking to each other wasn't supposed to happen.

I also hated playing in horrid venues and hanging around for hours on end and playing on stages where I couldn't hear the music properly and where I felt the horrendous pressure of giving people something that they ? [wanted? understood?]

So Zariba was set up for people to come and explore whatever might happen for them in a given space. We try to find nice place to play with heating and a kitchen and nice floors and window with views. Once we enter this space we are improvising. We move things about. Speak to each other. Dance make sounds. Make tea. Eat biscuits. Write. Paint. And I tend to speak about what's on my mind along with all of the above. We respond to the venue we're in, firstly by enjoying it, and secondly by incorporating the things that are in the venue. We like village halls and old-fashioned places with proper old kitchens and proper old tea pots.For some of us memories are stored in such buildings, for others it's a glimpse into the memory of the other or a view onto a plane glass window of now. We often use a lovely old Girl Guide Hut in Bristol, or Brighton Zariba has met in Rottingdean village hall and a tabernacle out in the countryside. Sometimes we play outdoors. We let come up what might come up. People come and go. Some stay for the whole duration [usually 3 hours] some just a short while. One of our member is a very ill person so she comes at the end and we all try to be quiet when she plays because her strength is not always great.  We try to be as we really are. We explore surface spaces within the environment alongside deep spaces within our memory/psyche. We explore one another and with another. It's an improvisation on what is I guess maybe, possibly. Nothing much happens. Nothing major. Just life. We pack away and we take the story of another process on into the process of life.



We usually play in the daytime. I don't like to be out at night, and least of all in music venues; they tend to be a bit noisy and boring for huge chunks of the evening I feel. 

Mark Anthony Whiteford  

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