LISTENING TO – AND WITH – EACH OTHER My musical work with Luk Perceval by Jens Thomas
For his 2003 production of “Othello” at the Münchner Kammerspiele, Luk Perceval was looking for an improvisational pianist. We came into contact through a recommendation from Laurent Simonetti. Once Luk had heard my CDs, we met for the first time in the spring of 2002. I was doing a concert with saxopho nist Christof Lauer in a town whose name I forget. But I can certainly remember the bald man without a hat (!) who approached me in the auditorium of the club shortly before the start of the concert. “Just have fun,” he said, and we did. And that essentially became the mantra of our collaboration. During rehearsals it transformed into “do your thing”. And from our first encounter I realised – the guy really means it. With everything. But above all – and this was the key for me – with my freedom to improvise the music. Not improvising as an “invention” of something, instead making audible something that seems invisible. The central element was always the assertion that everything arises in the moment, and differently every night. Not played, but actually physically called forth. I was so absorbed by the emotional acting of the actors that at one rehearsal, without noticing I started singing. Because Luk recorded all of his rehearsals on video, I was able to witness this initial ignition for myself. He and the ensemble wiped away my shame: “do your thing”. Luk’s underlying idea was to tell “Othello” theatrically and musically at the same time. So I was playing the whole time, just about. The actors had to get used to it. And in contrast to my concerts I had to reduce my playing and use fewer notes. The first few weeks we kept arguing, until finally we all realised – there is
something special happening here. We recognised that it would only work if we really listened to each other and the music remained completely independent without having to illustrate the production. Musically, small enduring motifs would emerge in certain spots. But I never knew where and how I had started and where it would lead me. Temperatures, aggregate states and textures changed constantly in the interaction, and so the music remained freely improvised until the last performance. I always tried to come in between the actors’ lines, so that there would be a dialogue between melodies and phrases. In nine years and more than one hundred performances as a group on stage we developed a way of communicating of an intensity, closeness and strength that I only encountered again in collaborating with Matthias Brandt. At some point in “Othello” we were like an organism that follows its own consciousness to tell the story anew every time, shaded a little differently each time. For two hours I would dive down, forget myself, and listen to every breath, every change in voice and mood. I experienced listening in an entirely new dimension, and the more I listened to the actors, the more I exploded within my space. In “Hamlet”, my second work with Luk, I wasn’t on stage, but rather in the orchestra pit of the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. Whereas I played “Othello” without amplification, here a microphone opened up new opportunities for using my voice in a lighter and more relaxed way. A new step and a completely different approach. Although the interaction with lyrics and actors was essential to “Hamlet” as well, it was more a kind of opera we were making, only with improvised
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