The metaphor of creation and destruction guides the performance art project between RISD illustration students and the musicians of the Silk Road Project, an educational foundation directed by famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
At the first workshop, students painted their reactions to improvised music, which played as they took turns working on the canvas. Students made abstract forms on the three eight-by-eight foot canvases in reaction to foreign instruments like the shakuhachi, a Japanese flute made of bamboo, and the kemancheh, a Persian spike fiddle, as the musicians played in response to the forms on the canvas. The intention was not to create a finished piece but to explore the interplay between music and visual art.
The collaborative workshop, part of a four-day residency project that took place on the Rhode Island School of Design campus from April 1 to 5, marked the first meeting between RISD students and 20 musicians, including Ma himself, from the Silk Road Ensemble. As part of a five-year long educational partnership with RISD, the Silk Road Project set up office a month ago at the Merchants Bank building in downtown Providence.
A statue of the Shiva Nataraj, the dancing form of the Hindu god Lord Shiva, and the myth associated with the sculpture were the underlying inspiration for the paintings created during the workshop. The statue depicts Shiva performing the Dance of Bliss, a pictorial allegory for the cosmic cycles of creation and destruction. According to legend, Shiva defeated three main enemies: a snake, a figure of egoism; a tiger, a symbol of the untamed mind; and a dwarf who represents ignorance, said Dylan DeWitt RISD '05.5, an illustrations student. Each character was assigned to one canvas.
The fulfillment of this narrative inspiration and a limited palette of black and white paint were the project's only regulations. "We tried to set up a certain area of possibility without defining the possibility too much," DeWitt said.
Where the project would go depended on the students' and musicians' constantly changing reactions to the others' work.
"The idea was that it was everybody's painting," said Ben Verhoeven RISD '05.
The generally very private activity of painting suddenly became a collaborative art form in this project, said Rob Brinkerhoff, head of the illustrations department at RISD. He said by relinquishing the individual vision of how the project was going to look and by collaborating with one another, students learned about their own way of working and gained exposure to a performance art that relies on two parties.
Having never collaborated with musicians on an art piece before, Verhoeven said, the experience was "totally new for me." "I was trying to listen to where (the musician) was going and trying to look back on the painting," he said. To "let your arm just move with the music" was at first uncomfortable but then became a liberating experience, he said.
The four-day residency also included the involvement of students from the film/animation/video and digital media departments of RISD. For the workshop, cameras around the RISD Auditorium where the performance was staged followed the musicians as they played "Tarang," an existing composition from the Silk Road Ensemble album. As students operated the cameras, images of the musicians were projected on various monitors throughout the auditorium and acted as cues for the musician to start playing. Daniel Peltz, assistant professor of the department of film/animation/video, likened the performance to "monitors dancing on stage along with the musicians."
In the future, Brinkerhoff said more departments will be involved in the collaboration as a way of making connections across various mediums, one of the main purposes of the Silk Road Project.
"(Ma is) looking constantly for establishing very trusting, open and energetic relations between different types of people and artists for a more global interaction," Brinkerhoff said. "A big mission of his is to break down barriers, cultural and artistic."
