Tapestry’s Tap:Ex shows are experimental by design.  They combine “classical” music making with something else in the hope that some interesting, and maybe even useful, ideas will emerge for future projects.  This year’s show; Tap:Ex Versus in the Great Hall at OCAD, combined piano improvisation with an “art battle”.  There were two shows with different pianists.  At the early show Morgan-Paige played while Julie Amlin and Enrique Bravo painted.

The keyboard and both canvasses were projected on a large screen so no matter where one was sitting one could see, as well as hear, all the action.  It soon became clear to me that Julie was being influenced by the ,music; which she confirmed after the show.  The pace she was working at and the colours she chose aligned with Morgan-Paige’s very varied pianism; some straightforward major key stuff, lots of extended technique, some singing into the piano.  After about 20 minutes I was looking at Julie’s painting and thinking it was a really interesting colour study.  Then she reached for the orange.  The lady sitting next to me groaned audibly; I inwardly.  Then the green.  The longer things went on the less I liked the picture which ended up as a semi-abstracted landscape in a mixture of pinks, purples, oranges and greens.

It was a bit harder to tell what Enrique was up to as he placed himself squarely between canvas and camera at least half the time!  What was clear that this was some sort of streetscape with a figure in it and I felt (subsequently confirmed) that it had been planned in advance rather than created in response to the music.  Maybe the music resulted in it being a bit darker and more brooding than might otherwise have been the case but it really didn’t feel spontaneous.

I do wonder whether t might have been better to give the artists less time; more spontaneity and fewer second thoughts?  In any event an interesting experiment.

Photo credits: Brian Medina