If you have ever played a part in creating a theatre production, you will know that it’s always a challenge to work out just how your show should start. In those opening moments, what can the performers do that will artfully draw a multitude of individual spectators into feeling that they are now an audience with a living, breathing, shared focus toward what is about to unfold on stage? Tonight, we were in the expert hands of Jo Zanders and Luc Mishalle, co-founders of the community music organization Met-X from Brussels, Belgium.
This year’s festival resident artists, they know well how hearing sound—in this case the music of a single tootling soprano saxophone accompanied by the rhythm of a single beating drum—can almost instantly weave together a sea of people into a blended, attentive collective. Playing their instruments, the musicians wended their way from outside of the auditorium in through the side door and up on to the boards. The sound met us all where we sat and carried us together into the evening. Like the children in The Pied Piper of Hamelin, we gleefully embraced the sound and followed them as complicit co-creators of the event.
See the rest of this post at the following link – icafrotterdam.com/blog/2023/03/30/will-weigler-blog-2-icaf-2023-opening/
