As a theatre-maker, director and actor I like to work with different art and performing disciplines. My first time working together with a dancer, voice performer and jazz musician I had to learn their kind of ‘language’.

Instead of talking or discussing about our disciplines we started looking at each other’s work, and focussed on PHRASING:

1. phrasing of (dance) movements.
2. phrasing of a sound, rhythm or musical line.
3. phrasing of movements of drawing or visual art.
4. phrasing of words, text.
5. phrasing of emotional expression.

We started communicating by doing one phrase and react on each other’s phrase, using our own discipline. This helped me to understand – for example – how differently in each discipline beginnings and endings are marked. This experience gave me later on a good tool to position myself as a performer in an interdisciplinary performance context and be positively productive to each other’s approach in the different art and performing fields.

Three years later, 2019 Gothenburg IIIF.02, this awareness of each other different approach of working with these different performing disciplines helped me also to understand our research and work process inside this open platform. I could not access this work without the knowledge of each other’s performing skills. I also believe that this knowledge and awareness of each other’s disciplines helped the quality of the instant composition.

My personal note – Esmeralda Detmers 2019