From a walking reading
to a concert.
This article is written as it happens. A coaching process from the first meeting to a finished concert, chapter by chapter. I do not know how it ends.
She raised her hand
I was giving a talk for the Norwegian Armed Forces Music. Tiina Granum volunteered, came up on stage and walked across the floor while the rest watched. I read her walk, out loud, in front of her colleagues.
That is a vulnerable moment. What happened afterwards was not that she learned something new about herself. It was that she was seen precisely, and that the room saw the same thing.
A few weeks later she got in touch. She is making a concert performance, and asked whether I could help her create it.
Trust is not built by promising something. It is built by seeing something accurately, once.
The uniform hangs there first, with no one in it
Four hours with Tiina Granum and the composer Christian Afreth Eriksen. We did not begin with music. We began by taking the uniform apart as a concept.
The first image we agreed on is a uniform in light. No body inside it. No person. Just the shape, lit, with glitter and a little dirt.
A garment standing on its own already tells the story. A uniform exists before you put it on, and it exists after you have taken it off. What the concert asks is what happens to a human being in between.
Along the way the subject moved. This is not only about the armed forces, it is about being uniformed, and everyone knows that. Teenagers in identical outfits who do not dare anything of their own. We call it belonging when we like it, and conformity when we do not.
That was when it became clear what the concert is really about. Not clothes, but what you give up in order to be part of something, and what you get back.
The rest of the structure was decided today as well. That we are keeping to ourselves until the premiere.
The next chapter comes after the next session.