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Second piece

Piece by Piece 2: Nick Roth & Olesya Zdorovetska

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IMC and Triskel come together to host a weekly sequence of online performance called Piece By Piece featuring leading Irish improvisers, which kicked off on Friday 10th April.

Each artist’s input performance will influence the next performance in this musical chain. Piece by piece, artists will create new improvised work, based on the preceding work. Improvising musicians are uniquely skilled at interpretation and spontaneous creation allowing for fresh creation of the highest calibre and a unique 'live art' experience for the Piece By Piece online audience.

Multi-talented couple saxophonist/composer/producer Nick Roth and vocalist/instrumentalist/composer Olesya Zdorovetska, gave us their poetic reflections on improvisation, isolation and collaboration. They create the second link in the chain this Friday 17th April at 20:00 GMT+1.

Q 1. How do you think the world is changing or will change as result of the COVID-19 crisis?

Turned out our Fragile

Fantasie of

Private Property,

our Domaines

of Colony Capital,

Were all along a Baroque

Waste Land

and now in this Fermata

Of Indoor Sprayer

Ezekiel foretells a new destruction of the Temple

Q 2. What does improvisation mean to you?

The First Steps in Music Theory

are Remembering the Future

You never know where it could end up

Utopia

Is a Golden Time

to Start

Q 3. How do you think about engaging with material or ideas from another artist when improvising?

The Piece by Piece platform directly situates our collaboration as a response to the previous artist in the series, Shane Latimer, and brings with it an awareness that our work will be part of the ongoing ripple effect as it travels across Ireland's airwaves. This structure provided the grist for our mill...when we saw Shane's brilliant work it immediately changed the approach that we were planning to take. The strongest influence was the realisation that Shane took the viewer outside of the room - he had treated his performance as a film work from the outset. This sparked many ideas...the one that we ran with in the end was to take a short walk around our area (by coincidence our road actually features in Shane's film) and capture words that jumped out of the cityscape. We then added words from inside the house to form six found poems, which created a structure for the piece as a whole - and which you can read extracts from in the responses above.

Freedom in improvisation comes from overcoming restriction, in this case the texts provided enough of a nudge to spontaneously compose all of the music in two days. Olesya's bowing of the zither was also a nod to Shane's bowed guitar.

We hope very much that our piece provides some sparks of inspiration to the next performer in the series, Seán MacErlaine and to all of the other artists to follow. Thanks again for this opportunity to collaborate...actually our first as a duo!

Catch the premiere of Nick & Olesya's piece on Friday 10th April at 20:00hrs by subscribing to IMC's YouTube channel or Triskel's Facebook.

Read about the First Piece, Shane Latimer's experience with Piece by Piece HERE and experience his piece HERE.

Read Nick & Olesya's found poems HERE.

Their full performance is now on Youtube

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