Ep9 Interaction of time, movement and music - Joe Kelly

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Luke  00:00:04  Hello and welcome to another episode of Impro Pod. Today I'm interviewing movement specialist and lifeguard Joe Kelly. How you doing, Joe? Yeah, thanks. So, what's your relationship to improvisation? I think everything is improvisation.

Joe  00:00:19  At the end of the day, and I've always found that sort of freedom of moving naturally and not being constrained as something I've been drawn to. For me, it's not necessarily been the sense of improvisation, but the dislike of the structure. I've always wanted to try and find new ways to do things or explore what you can do.

Luke  00:00:37  All right. So I'm going to play you a piece of music, and I want you to tell me what that makes you think of and the kinds of thoughts, emotions, ideas that come into your mind. All right.

Joe  00:01:29  The first thing that I thought was the Muhammad Ali's float like a butterfly, sting like a bee thing. And then it felt like rain. Gentle rain. I guess I sort of thinking like in terms of movement, it's like you're being delicate, not floaty, delicate, if that makes sense.

Luke  00:01:52  So are you up for telling me a story? Could be anything you like. And then I'm gonna improvise a soundtrack to it.

Joe  00:02:00  Okay, so the thing that I've been really intrigued by recently is when I surf and going out in fairly big waves, which if you stood up there sort of well over your head, a little bit intimidating at times, and all the attention is actually not on the wave itself, but on how your fingers feel moving through the water, or how the light feels or looks on the surface of the water. So you've got this like micro attention as you're moving through this actually quite challenging and potentially scary environment. You're sort of detached from the reality of it and engage much more in this tiny little detail as you're moving through this kind of churning ocean. I can just remember paddling out. You can see all the other guys on the wave, and obviously the wave was going to break in front of me, which means you got to duck dive under it. Often you feel that you're just looking at the colours or feeling how your hand moving through the water, or hearing the sort of slight lapping of the water on your board, which just seems to be a very weird way of dealing with something that's actually quite a challenging Interesting situation.

Luke  00:03:03  Oh, cool. That's a really interesting idea musically. The way that you perceive these small things instead of the big picture. Okay, time for some music then. here we go. Did that work for you at all? Yeah.

Joe  00:04:21  Funnily enough, one of the things that you find when you're out in bigger surf, you like, you don't dive through the waves as the waves approaching. It's like properly intense. And then you often come through it, come out of the water, the other side, and there's just this eerie silence. It's like you're burst into a silent room from this really hectic place. And I think what I was getting at is that as you get more comfortable in the ocean, your attention goes away from the big scary thing and towards this stuff that you just sort of weirdly intrigued by. I always think it's a bit like the scene in The Matrix where he's just looking at the bullet in front of him, and you just get this weird, almost slowing of what you're doing.

Joe  00:04:59  Lightning of the attention.

Luke  00:05:02  You felt that came across in the music?

Joe  00:05:04  Yeah, it had that kind of almost eerie feel about it. And I guess that comes back to the improv again. You're playing with the water, as opposed to trying to do something that you had thought of previously. That makes sense.

Luke  00:05:17  Yeah, I get you. so do you want to tell me another story, then?

Joe 00:05:21  Yeah.

Joe  00:05:22  It's. Most of the stuff I think about is just things that I do. Okay. So it's going to be sort of a movement thing again, just because that's what I tend to think about. It was quite a long a few years ago I was in Totnes just cycling home, and I had a carrier bag full of shopping in one hand on my bike, and the hand that it was on was also the handlebar that had the gear change that I needed to change. And so I foolishly reached across with the other hand to change gear. My bike wheel just flipped. Next thing I knew, the bike had cartwheeled down the road and I was standing on the pavement with a bag of shopping in one hand, completely untouched somehow.

Luke  00:05:59  That's quite impressive.

Joe  00:06:01  Yeah, it's quite stands out a bit as a memory.

Luke  00:06:04  Okay, here we go. So was that a faithful representation?

Joe  00:06:53  That was a reasonable representation. Yeah. There might have been a slight bit more surprise. The actual event.

Luke  00:06:58  Surprise. Okay, what about something like this?

Speaker 4 00:07:29  Yeah.

Joe  00:07:30  So that's definitely more like it. The reason it stayed with me, I think it was that bizarre, calm, surreal thing of just being stood on the pavement with a bag of shopping, having basically just fallen off my bike. And what happened when I started learning about movement is that I suddenly realized that I've been doing this stuff all along. I started realizing that what I was actually learning about was what I used to do as a kid, which I think is the case for a lot of stuff. We do sort of physical play and stuff really sets you up to then understand what you study later on. I definitely think that's what happened with me.

Luke  00:08:08  So time for another story then.

Luke  00:08:11  What about a travel story?

Joe  00:08:14  I got dengue fever whilst travelling, which was obviously not great. I caught it in El Salvador. I remember I got bitten by literally one mosquito, and I got on a bus to Nicaragua and was absolutely fine at the beginning of the bus journey, and by the end of it, like the highest fever I've ever had, there's a lovely dry, sunny day. It was in San Salvador, the capital. Yeah, it's an amazing place. And as I went through, you sort of go into a bit of a tunnel, don't you? I just went into this little room, which was not a nice place. It was a sort of like a cupboard in someone's house with a door that was basically bars. And I just went to sleep, like at the end of it, I was just absolutely gone, basically. The recovery was quite, entertaining as well. I got prescribed something that just made me feel slightly stoned for the next ten days. And I then ended up in another room, which was a bit nicer.

Joe  00:09:09  only it had a massive spider living in the shower at the foot of my bed. See, I spent the next ten days imagining that climbing up the sort of sheets of don't sleep.

Luke  00:09:18  This good travel story. So I'm gonna concentrate on the bus journey and this sense of delusion that comes over you as you get affected by the fever. Okay, here we go. So did that reflect your experience in any way?

Joe  00:11:20  Yeah, I think it maybe got a bit darker even than that was the end. And I think that's looking out and seeing the scenery and kind of enjoying where you are to just wanting to go to sleep. It's all very tight little space.

Luke  00:11:33  At the end. Did you get the sense of the bus?

Joe  00:11:35  I think I got the sense at the beginning of looking around. It sounded like you were exploring.

Luke  00:11:41  I think like a lot of things, buses have a particular rhythm. So I composed a rhythm for the bus siren and then distorted the harmony as you went into a different mental space and then made the rhythm disappear completely towards the end.

Joe  00:11:58  Yeah. It went from being comfortable to just not.

Luke  00:12:09  Okay, one last story, then. How about something exploring the idea of movement?

Joe  00:12:14  I've been playing a lot of touch rugby recently. I'm very interested with the perception of time. I'm not musical at all, but I guess the input of the sort of idea that you have a certain structure that you can work off to improvise. And I think the same thing happens with your body and movement of interest in how structures help you to be more free when touch rugby is very, very fast. So you're running up to someone who, if they touch you, you have to put the ball down. That phase of play stops in approaching them. You're obviously looking to get around them, and I'm always trying to look for little cheeky sort of offloads with the ball and for someone else running into a space beside you, and you'll often end up waiting. It must be a quarter to half a second, that space of time. You've got a load of thoughts going for your head.

Joe  00:12:59  You're looking at all of these different things. It's a really bizarre space to be where the time just seems to slow and it gives you that ability to choose in the moment in a way that seems like you almost shouldn't be able to do it.

Luke  00:13:12  Okay, so with the music, I'm gonna concentrate on this game of rugby. I'm going to look at the way your perception of time slows down.

Joe  00:15:11  It definitely relates to a lot of the movement stuff that I do where you get those perceptions just shift. In fact, all of the things I've spoken about have that shift in perception, like real time into weirdly distorted time. Slow it all the changing of the sort of rhythms of it, whereas in reality the actual rhythm almost remains the same, doesn't it? The perception just shifts.

Luke  00:15:32  There are quite a few sports films that use that kind of distortion of perception. I mean, Chariots of Fire being the classic example. Of course, the sound design and the music helped with that effect. Films like Raging Bull, where you get these moments where the sound kind of becomes heavy and slowed down.

Luke  00:15:47  But have you experienced that sort of effect in reality?

Joe  00:15:51  I think from my experience, I've had times where the sound like as things get hectic in movement, often the sound actually goes and you just see stuff, but you still get that sense of the rhythm. The surfing, like sometimes you find you actually hearing something that's very small. Even though there's a huge noise approaching and a breaking wave, you hear the ripples of the water on your board or something like that. You pick out a completely different sound to the sort of dominant sound that you should be hearing.

Luke  00:16:26  Okay, so going back to music's relationship with movement, if I was to play an improvisation of someone jumping onto a wall, say smoothly, it might sound something like this. Whereas if I played a clumsy jump, it might sound something like this.

Joe  00:16:50  A little stumble step you played that's like a beat and a half, isn't it? It's like I've tripped and then my foot has to get down before my foot would have gone down if I was just walking.

Joe  00:17:01  One of the little bits you did that reminds me of running over uneven terrain. Say, Dartmoor or something, where you're running and it's all stony because you've got a natural cadence as a human. People said you run at 180 beats a minute roughly, but I think in each individual has a sort of a rhythm. But the ground rarely matches that rhythm when it's uneven. And so you've got to then move in the way the ground wants you to move. I had an idea which I was trying to explore in terms of, again, rugby stuff. We have this idea, don't we? Often where you have to solve a problem. So you go into a situation trying to solve the problem. And I actually thought, we want to go into a situation and ask a question or find a problem to solve, in which I guess maybe is what improv is, isn't it? You try something out and it's like, okay, that doesn't quite work. I've got this thing that I want to do. So if that doesn't work, how do I find something that might be closer to it?

Luke  00:17:58  And that's this whole process where improvisation becomes composition.

Luke  00:18:03  So if I was to compose for a beach scene, for example. Then I might think that's kind of nice, but it's not taking into account something or it's not quite working with the vision for the film. The waves might be a bit rougher, for example. There's all these little decisions that you have to make. Some might try something like this. And. Then I might think, oh, that's a bit jazzy.

Joe  00:18:52  And then whilst you're doing that, do you find that you're asking yourself little questions like, if I do that a bit hard, I use that different shape in those little moments. But almost between notes, I think we're always asking questions, aren't we?

Luke  00:19:06  Yes. You don't know what the questions are when you start, and sometimes you have to make that wrong turn in order to find out what they are.

Joe  00:19:14  When I say asking questions, I don't mean asking a question in language. I mean I'm exploring even with movement. For example, in the equivalent of playing a note, you might find that a step starts off too hard.

Joe  00:19:28  And so before you put all your weight on your foot, you soften it. And so in the same way, like I suspect, whether you're conscious of it or not, you're doing the same with the keys. It's like you might find that you're. Yeah, one key was too loud, so the next one you're going to hit a little bit softer. So you've got that sort of micro adjustment as you're moving through it.

Luke  00:19:47  There's definitely that thing that you're just evolving constantly. And if you hit a roll like a wrong note, which isn't anything an improvisation. But if I wanted to go. And accidentally without meaning to, I went something like. I then have to kind of correct it by going. You're dealing with the situation you. I've resolved it.

Joe  00:20:21  Somehow. I mean, I've had times where I've slipped and what you get out of a slip and proves what you're doing. Oh, my little boy. Quite funnily, he hurt himself two years ago at Christmas. He was like six or something, and he fell over.

Joe  00:20:33  And he said that normally when I trip over, I just go faster. He has such good balance that he would just carry on going and he'd already realised that like six. And I think that is improv, isn't it. It's like when you, you quote unquote mess something up and if you're good at it, you'll use that to your advantage.

Luke  00:20:49  Yeah, I think that's the case in music as well, especially composition. So thanks very much for being on the podcast, Joe. It's quite rare to talk to someone about the parallels between improvisation in music and improvisation and movement. Join us next time for another episode of Improv Pod. Thanks for listening.