“We’re such a little drop in the bucket,” says Chicago composer Gene Coleman. “You can’t really even talk about what effect our work has, or might have, on this mass of popular culture. But you have to try to get more people aware of this stuff. Otherwise, all this information is going to be gone–there’s gonna be reruns of Mod Squad, and that would be the world.”
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Coleman and Macklin see the workshop, which will culminate in a performance, as an opportunity for Chicago music makers and “movers” (as Macklin calls them) to improvise music and movement simultaneously. They plan to try to break down certain barriers–between music and sound, for example, and between everyday and stylized movement. They’d also like to test the prohibitions against musicians moving around the stage and against dancers making noise.
In Paris Macklin started to study mime, thinking it “a midway between theater and movement,” but was not satisfied with that either. “Mime,” she says, “is quite static. And also, the way it’s taught, it’s either very representational or very detailed–just isolated movements. And you do it for years. It’s a technique, and you have to want to perform that technique.”
But improvisation does need some structure, and Macklin and Coleman have come up with some exercises for their workshop participants. “People are going to move to someone improvising musically,” Coleman says, “and then we’ll reverse that process: the dancer will lead.” Macklin adds, “Or there’ll be contrast: ‘No matter what he’s playing, I’m not going to make myself be like that.’” Coleman would like to get away from the “one-dimensional logic” of sound and action that’s evolved from film and television–“you see a gun, you hear a gunshot.” If someone in the workshop is jumping around frenetically or writhing on the floor, he says, he might encourage a musician to “make a long, continuous note to go with that.”
