When asked how the concept for CROC originated, Black explains that the idea of the balloons came first. “I was looking for some kind of moment of floatation, and the idea to use balloons to float something comes from a childhood thing I wanted to re-create. I was researching about that and came across the story of “Lawn chair Larry”."
Floatation has intrigued Black recently, not just as a physical state but as a mental state and metaphor. “Since I was studying, I’ve been concerned with the idea of playing with the energy in a room in a concert,” Black explains and continues: “I used to speak of it in terms of trance – when you’re fully immersed in a piece of music you can enter a state of flow, where you lose awareness of your surroundings.”
“The subject of levitation also has an element of a desire to escape, and I see it as a sort of brief moment of escaping your own life,” James Black says. When Black came across the story of “Lawn chair Larry” they found out, that Larry was troubled throughout his life and had ended up taking his own life, a decade after the famous flight. James Black has lost people close to them in recent years, and struggling with the grief over that, they knew that this story was something they wanted to work with.
Despite this dark undercurrent, Black emphasizes that CROC isn’t a dramatization of Lawn chair Larry’s story or his struggles and it isn’t a dark piece at all. “It starts in a dark place, sure, but it moves through that darkness into a more hopeful space. Ideally, like moving through grief,” they say.
Humor often plays a significant role in James Black’s compositions, and this is also the case with CROC. Balloons will float around the concert hall, and a cluster of balloons will even lift an object. “There’s a children’s party aspect to it, and the staging has elements from my childhood, like PlayStation One graphics,” Black laughs and adds. “A fellow composer once described my work as ‘deep but not serious’. I like that.”
Trust is another key theme in CROC, both between composer and ensemble, within the ensemble and with the audience. "The piece includes a lot of text, and one line that comes back a lot is ‘I don’t trust you,’" says Black. “But later, I address the audience directly, apologizing for saying that, because clearly I do trust them, and I hope to create a moment of lightness through that trust.”
“It sounds a bit like a cliché, but the piece embodies a journey. It’s about trying to move through something to reach a state of levitation, about striving for lightness and to embrace trying something new,” James Black concludes, and the way the score evolves reflects this as well. “It starts with some pretty dark, heavy text elements, then moves into more structured musical scoring. By the end, even the way the score is presented changes — from precise handwriting to a video score, and eventually into a graphic score and instructions for improvisation. That’s part of a process of letting go of my control of what the music sounds like – and again – it’s about trust.”
Time and place
James Black: CROC
Performed by LUX:NM
Theater im Delphi, Berlin, Germany
27 January 8 pm
28 January 8 pm
Find more information about the performances here.