Through recommendations from my boss at the music school in Vejen I recently got in touch with a new playmate, Sophus Ejler Jepsen. I sent him an email, trying to win him as a partner for my soundwalks in Esbjerg and on Fanø, but instead it turns out that I am now joining his summer project first of all. When he read my mail, it struck him so relevant that he thought I was writing him regarding his own ideas. Needless to say we hit it off quite well when we later met in person and realised that our visions are overlapping so much.
So now we are scouting territory around one of the purest lakes in Denmark (Skærsø, where Vejen, Vejle and Kolding municipality meet) to set up camp with his "Skibelundtelt", a tent as a creative base, from where we'll conduct sensing expeditions and soundwalks for teenagers in the forest and fields surrounding the lake in August.
Inspired by the three-parted form of my soundwalk layout, we organise our sessions around the lake like sonatas with an exposition, development and recapitulation, both as an outer and inner structure. Introduction to ideas and materials - the walk with collection and combination of sensory experiences - and lastly exercises which collect and summarize our impressions.
The project at Skærsø, which is supported largely by the Vejen Art Museum, shall strengthen listening abilities - and on the whole our sensing apparatus. With the special landscape at Skærsø as a framework, the course offers unexpected listening and sensory experiences through new ways of observing sounds and through visual and tactile exercises.
Sophus nowadays works a lot with ceramics and clay and collects samples from all around the country to, among other things, add different textures to his self made cups and tea-pots. Those cups will hold waters from different natural sources and wells from Denmark. Instead of wine, there will be a water tasting, maybe also from the lake itself..., but also writing and drawing excercises with nature materials and I will be playing flute at some point as well. I just got very excited by the idea of how to translate the concept of "lines of beauty", which are found in the forms and structures in nature, into excercises that could embody those lines in a sort of introductory choreography including breathing cycles... or something... before in the end they will be applied on paper when we wrap up the walk.
We are still very much in the incubating and idea collecting phase, but I feel a very strong sense of direction and am looking forward to the coming expeditions.