The Colour of Music
The Colour of Music
Understanding abstract art can prove a challenge for the casual gallery visitor. The Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky is particularly hard to appreciate because the artist uses music jargon to develop complex theories around colour and shape.
However, the visual brilliance of works, such as the ‘Composition’ series, made him an ideal subject for the Colour of Music, a series of workshops in partnership with Oak Lodge School that successfully boosted the appreciation of 25 Deaf schoolchildren for abstract art through music, drama, and movement.
At the project’s end two main performance pieces emerged:
• Year 9: a movement piece that involved one group operating long, different coloured shards of transparent fabric – blue, yellow and mauve – in imitation of a sea in response to a ‘Battleships’ theme evoked by Kandinsky, accompanied by ‘mood music’ created by a second group;
• Year 7: a short play based on a three-part piece of music about birds dancing round a sun-dial, before clashing in a fight and one of them dying.
The children were again grouped in two, with one group acting out a party that went dead after being gate-crashed by a thug, and the second playing ‘mood’ music also split in three parts: joy, conflict, and tragedy.
Oak Lodge School followed this up with an assembly-style ‘showcase’ in its Sports Hall on 17th May 2006.
