OTOCRON

Hello world indeed. I’ll leave the css’ing for later, and will allow myself some trial and error when I’m at it. The first thing to do know would be to show you some footage of Oorbeek together with Bodies Anonymous, that was shot only yesterday at the BIMHuis in Amsterdam.

The occasion was the monthly Dance and Music Impro Lab. We (six members of the band Oorbeek and four dancers of Bodies Anonymous) played Oorbeeks game Oordeel - that probably best translates as Judgement. In this game you either play or you conduct. Conductors conduct the players, and can make them stop playing as well. They can also tell the other conducters to start playing. If a conducter tells you to stop playing, you automatically turn into a conductor. Conductors use a set of gestures to make their interventions understood. Obeying the rules is, of course, sacred. But they leave an interesting form of freedom within their structure.
A complete explanation and visual display of Oordeel’s gestures can be found at Oorbeek’s website . Do play Oordeel as much as you like, or play it by your own rules (it’s an open source game!) but please mention Oorbeek if you play it. And let us know if you have good ideas about new gestures (oorbeek [at] oorbeek [dot] net )
As it turned out, Oordeel was as effectively playable by dancers as by musicians.
What was very exciting about the show and its non-categorising approach to body movement and sonic behaviour (speaking from the perspective of a musician on stage) was how the spatial aspects of making music developed over the performance. During the show Oorbeek was somehow unpacked. Musicians started to intentionally move over the stage - location, coming together, spreading out, lining up, orientation, kneeling, etc. becoming almost architectural aspects of playing music. Using the space and choosing places, postures and directions became meaningful but it didn’t get narrative (OK, here and there it did) and that (I think) kept it very open for the audience to experience at their own leisure.