IMFourPlay

It Takes Two to Duet: Rehearsal Number Ten

Monday night was our second of three public master class workshops. The focus tonight was duets and building the structure of the song. I was pleased to see that we pretty much had everyone return from last week. In addition to this being a nice ego stroke (!), it also enabled us to jump to it a little quicker. Jim provided a fun vocal warmup - it was a little shock to see him step out from behind his keyboard, but it did end the rumours that he never wears pants at SAK! There is something almost inspirational about 16 or so voices singing together (even if it's just scales).

Then we jumped into some harmonizing, rhythmic and rhyming exercises after a stint of Last Letter Slap-Clap-Snap. (It's one of my favourite warm-up games, but it tends to make everyone feel a little clumsy, myself included!) With such a healthy group size, I was keen to get to the song exercises a little quicker than last week, so we then explored a series of echo duets/songs. While this worked reasonably well when Jim and I conducted this series last year, this group really seemed to attack the format, and there was a lot of immediately evident growth. Loosely speaking, the duet simply consists of one player taking the lead by singing individual lines of lyric that the second player then repeats or echoes (hence the ever-so-original song title!) It can be a very liberating way of creating verse lyric as each player's role is simply defined and inter-related, and I love that it also has the added benefit of encouraging active listening between the singers. So often, you can disappear into your head when the music starts up on the stage. There were many fun examples of quirky relationships developing through the song format: Greg was a gruff homeless man trying to pick up someone else's bride, Robyn (literally) at a train station; Charles and BC were two unconventional high-voiced wrestlers with a bawdy tattoo; Chase and Ronda explored forbidden sibling love in a hospital waiting room; Stephen and Richard displayed finesse as love-torn breakdancers; and Jose and Darren competed for a plumbing position in a creative one-up-manship number.

After the break, we looked at the elements of song structure and how they can help shape and build a number. While most of us have an inherent knowledge of song verses, choruses, hooks and bridges, as improvisers it's helpful to explore the purpose of these features in song construction. This ended up being a lot of fun! We culminated with each pair selecting a song structure secretly - I would like to take credit for this last idea, so I will! ;) Again there were some great relationship songs, such as: Chase and Sheri as party-crashing siblings; Richard and Kate as a squabbling couple on an ill-fated road trip; Larry and Mark channeling a soon-to-be-released-blockbuster as dead pirates; and Ron and Jamie as a doctor and patient arguing over the state of a liver.

I'm taking some of these duet formats and skills into Tuesday's FourPlay rehearsal, so I'm hopeful we can build on this strong foundation.

I've been told I need more gossip in my blogs to make them more juicy! Sadly, I don't have any - so feel free to attach your own in the comments...

Thank you to those who are periodically checking in on my rants. And to those of you aren't... well, you might just become the focus of some good gossip!!

Your stereo-songster Director, David C.