Big Bang Night: Balloon Orchestra Workshop

The last Monday before Christmas saw the Clerkenwell Workshops welcome its last event of the year, Sergio Lopez Figueroa’s fourth Big Bang Night.

‘Big Bang Nights’ always provide their audience with a big idea. The Big Big Lab, Sergio’s organisation, spends its time pioneering ‘participatory creativity and cultural knowledge for social change’. Hence, in the past he has brought events to the Clerkenwell Workshops that consider Music and Peace in the Middle East and the effect of Music on Autistic Children.

Last night’s event asked the questions: What is the sound of Change? Sergio’s ‘Balloon Orchestra Workshop’ certainly provided its fair share of participatory creativity.

 The night unfolded like this:

 Before the event began guests found their way to the Club Workspace venue at the Clerkenwell Workshops. Many arrived early and were met by some complimentary drinks, a chat and a comfortable shelter from the cold!

All the guests were seated in front of the projector screen before Sergio and Monika of Dreamstake got the event underway with a short welcome. Then, Sergio played a short film which discussed the Big Bang Lab’s previous work and included crowdversation footage from previous events. What’s a crowdversation? A conversation, recorded by those who are participating!

Then, the event proper got underway. After a short game which involved blowing up balloons and giving yourself a number based on the mathematics of your first name (don’t ask) the guests were split into teams. There were three groups. Each group was armed with a booty of balloons and given the same task: Come back in half and hour and perform your devised piece.

The point of this exercise is to inspire participation and collaboration. When people who have only just met are attempting to compose a song using only the budget chattel of a children’s entertainer, ‘normal’ modes of communication are thrown out of the nearest window.

The feat of balloon orchestration involves many tasks. Those of exploring your instrument, getting to know your team and communicating your ideas about such an abstract task. It seems absurd to speak of creating balloon-tunes in the same clause as corporate business, but that is exactly what the attendees ended up doing.

The balloon task explodes normal communication channels and forces participants to think outside of the box to share their creative ideas with each other. This, Sergio agreed, could be very useful in corporate settings. If inter-team discursivity is stagnating, a Balloon Orchestra Workshop would certainly invigorate a group of people. It would reopen old streams of dialogue, and perhaps irrigate some new ones.

The three teams, who adopted the names ‘The Fab Five’, ‘What’s in a Name’ and ‘Working Title’, all agreed that the balloon task encouraged them to explore different methods of communication, as they created, explored and giggled their way through the music-making.

The performances, believe it or not, were scored! I shan’t delve into the complexities of the scoring-method in this blog but it would be rude not the mention that ‘The Fab Five’ won with consummate ease.

The night ended with the former balloon-musicians spread to the four corners of Club Workspace, chatting, networking and making friends. Two conversations that I managed to eavesdrop were a testament to the event’s diverse appeal. A lady who works at the Barbican Centre was getting to know a gentleman who runs workshops with prisoners. On the seat closest to them an app developer was talking to a man whose career was in SEO.

I am always given a healthy amount to think about on the train home after a Big Bang Night. F.T. Marinetti flew into mind. He is often recognised as one of the ‘Futurists’, an artistic movement who wanted to tear up the history books and start art ‘history’ anew. However, Marinetti adopted existing compositional techniques, such as splitting his ‘scores’ into ‘movements’ and ‘parts’, but he replaced the ‘outdated’ musical instruments of the orchestra with the noise of the Italian war-machine. Bomb blasts, hand-claps, soldiers marching and the ring of shrapnel replaced violins, trumpets and flutes.

Last night, Marinetti’s technique was visible. The existing systems of music-creation largely remained - except in The Fab Five’s performance, which was close to performance art! - but percussive noise was produces by balloons, rather than by traditional musical instruments. Recognisable structures remained, but what they contained was strange, progressive and different.

Thank you to Monica for hosting the event, and thank you, Sergio, for making my mind explode. (again.)