Sarah’s Blog
Hi, I’m Sarah. I absolved the preperatory course ‘Filmscoring and Production’ at Musicube Academy and now I am a first year student for Composition for Film and Theatre. In this blog I’m gonna share my personal experience as a student at ArtEZ in Arnhem.
Any questions: sarahs_blog@yahoo.com
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It’s already 2021! And already two months have passed by so quickly. On the other hand it means that I spend my time well ’cause I didn’t even recognize it flying by so quickly.
At ArtEZ we started creatively into the new year with the annual ChoCo Project. I heard quite a lot of things about it already that I knew it (unfortenately) didn’t have anything to do with chocolate.
ChoCo is a project where choreographers and composers (that’s why it’s called ChoCo) of the ArtEZ in Arnhem work together. My fellow students from higher years already told me with passion about this project where you have to organise a whole show in two days! A group of choreographers and dancers get assigned to one composer. So the choreographers and the composers have to come up with ideas in a very short amount of time and put it into a piece of 3-5 minutes.
Usually the music was played by the orchestra ‘Ereprijs’ but under the current circumstances they couldn’t come this year. So this year the composers had to enter the stage themselves and play their own music. Sometimes it was pre-recorded but our task was to do both of it, on stage and off stage, at least once. It was quite a big challenge for some people but in the end everyone had lots of fun. We did 4 projects in a row and you could see the developement in musical composition, performing on stage and in general dealing with the whole task involving all the people.
Another thing that was new this year was, that we were assigned to composer groups! In every project two composers had to work together. The composers weren’t all studying at ArtEZ in Arnhem, but some were studying at ArtEZ in Zwolle. They focus on classical music, not filmmusic.
This was quite an experience too. I never worked with another composer besides some songwriting. In every project we had to work with different composers, so it was a great experience with lots to learn about communication and actually agreeing on things so you can present something at the end of the day.
The choreographers and the dancers were really nice and welcomed us into their little ‘family’. In every project we were given a new task that we were supposed to interpret creatively. It was interesting to try different approaches. Some days I spent the whole time at home in front of a screen to create some electronic pre-recorded sounds, sometimes I composed the whole piece on a piano at ArtEZ and sometimes I even spend the whole day in the studio right beside the dancers so the music really connected to the dancing.
Every project was a bunch of amazing experiences and it was incredible to see what we put up in only two days of work. Of course it was quite stressful too but it was definitely worth it! We learned how to work with time pressure, how it feels like to be on stage presenting your own music and how a collaboration with choreographers, dancers and composers actually works.
I hope you can make these amazing ecperiences too one day! 😉
All the best,
Sarah