These images were also taken a couple months ago during Shahar’s second Orchard Labs artist residency project in the desert in the south of Israel. We were scheduled to perform with some ‘jazz’ musicians who we’ve never met before. We were really looking forward to this performance – the space was initimate and the opportunity to perform with live mucusians is always embraced. We first met the musicians a few hours before the show.
They were a tight group who play jazz standards. They are not really improvising – they are playing set pieces – usually famous jazz tunes (hence the name ‘standards’). Therefor most of the responsibility to generate communication and collaboration was up to the performers in our group. The score was very open. The musicians were to open the performance on their own (our group was not in great shape and we needed more time to get prepared for the performance). We would then join in… and the rest is up to the gods of performance.
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The performance was a blast. Shahar, Mamen and Lior exploded into the space, and onto the musicians – and the audience had a great time. When we (Shahar’s group) found our ending, we all packed our bags and walked out the door that was on the ‘stage’ (you can the door it in many of the images). We were later told by someone from the audiences that one of the musicians said in awe, after we left, that ‘we really improvised the whole thing’. I think their Saxophone player will remember this night for a long time. It looked liked he was having the time of his life playing with Lior.