Udo heeft dit jaar aan een productietraject gewerkt waarin hij de crossmediale muziekvoorstelling Conducting Colors maakte. Hij heeft met gebruik van projecties de dirigent en de muziek gevisualiseerd, en zo het thema Noaberschap overgebracht op het publiek. Anita Elkink, zijn coördinator vanuit Stichting Heerlijk Heimland, stelde hem een aantal vragen tijdens de Cross-TIC showcase bij Oyfo op 6 oktober.
Anita:
Could you introduce yourself and tell us what you specialize in?
Udo:
I specialize in animation. I grew up quite close to Twente, which I think is the reason why I was invited to partake in this trajectory. The theme of the project was Noaberschap, which is basically about people taking care of each other in a neighborly way. I used Erik Vloeimans (a trumpet player who I really wanted to work with) to do a performance of 30 minutes during the Heimland Festival in June.
Anita:
How did you find out about this Cross-TIC Open Call?
Udo:
I think social media did its job, so heads up to Cross-TIC; you targeted me really well. It just dropped in my feed. I looked into it, also because it was in the east and I’m from there as well. I live and work in Utrecht, but it’s quite a competitive city when it comes to art. The call was very interesting, and I thought it would be interesting for me to see if it was possible to create a performance like this.
Anita:
Could you tell us what we’re looking at here?
Udo:
This is an image of my studio. I wanted to show this picture to show the spectrum of visuals that I work with, which is very analog. I started studying animation at the tailend of flipping paper, so that’s what I did during my studies. In the back of my studio there’s some technology, of which I can work some things myself, but I mostly work analog. At the top of my studio there’s a darkroom where I can develop pictures, which is something I do on the side; long exposure photography.
Anita:
Talking about technology, can you give us an insight into your process?
Udo:
When I got selected, I very was happy, buy I also thought: “What did I get myself into?”. There was a three month production period to turn the technology into a performance. We first started talking about the festival, what we could realise and what I wanted to do. We started connecting all the storylines that I had in mind with the theme of the festival and finding musicians. I had this dream of asking Erik Vloeimans, who is a very well known trumpet player. We’ve worked together on filmscores before, but I wanted to take myself to a higher lever and direct theatre. My idea was to get a professional involved so I could learn from him, which is why I asked Erik. I started looking for people who could mirror what I wanted to create and would make my ideas possible within the timespan of those three months. So that’s the first thing I did; think about the team.
“Sometimes you have to step back and make sure the foundation is set before you start making anything.”
Anita:
I’m interested in the most difficult and the most gratifying parts of the production process, could you tell us something about that?
Udo:
Well, I had three to four months to create this entire project. The awesome part was that I got to spend those months working on it fulltime, which had to do with the way the Open Call was set up. I was quite impressed with the financial planning that was included in the Open Call, which made it much easier for me to work with. I’ve not worked on many projects in which I could fully work on it for multiple months, so that, including working with the amazing people that made the production possible, was an amazing experience. The time aspect was also quite difficult. You’ve got all these ideas that you want to realise, but eventually when you start working with people, they have to have a say as well. Erik wanted to realise his part in this production as best as he could, which meant that we had to discuss every part of the process and of the performance. The location of the performance was also a bit of an issue. We tried playing in different spots, but there wasn’t any reverb in the original place where we wanted to play, so then technicians get involved or you switch locations. We just had to accept that we would play in a theatre that would need some tweaking in order to excecute the performance to our liking. The road to getting all of these things in place before getting creative was quite difficult and it took longer than I imagined.
Anita:
How did you experience showtime?
Udo:
It was really cool. We had two evenings, both of which were fully packed. I just had to sit back and enjoy it, there wasn’t much I could do when the show started. We actually had a glitch the first night, but everything went perfect the second night.
Anita:
Is there anything left you’d want to share with us?
Udo:
I guess the time-thing. We’re all here to learn, and each one of us will do that during a trajectory. But that’s one thing I learned, to really allow myself the time to prep things. We’re all creative so that’s what we want to start with as soon as possible when it comes to projects like this, but sometimes you have to step back and make sure the foundation is set before you start making anything.
Bekijk hier een opname van Udo’s voorstelling Conducting Colors.