Today was the third meeting with Lab21. Lab21 is a small group of master-students from the Royal Conservatoire. They meet me on a monthly basis for a two hour session on artistry and artistic reflection. This time the given task by e-mail was to prepare a quotation on freedom.

Step 1. At the start I immediately divided the group in duo conversations and asked them to exchange and question the quotations. After 5 minutes we changed partners and after another five minutes we changed partners again. Result of these strict rules was a very quick and rather deep exploration of the nature of freedom.

Step 2. I sent all the participants out to find within a restricted time of 5 minutes an unexpected image that accompanies our freedom-conversation so far. This exercise in association and interpretation always brings strong stories and images. It is what you could call an artistic reflection. It is also a way of concluding a conversation.

Step 3. We started to do different musical improvisations: a soundscape improvisation, a conversational improvisation, a rhythmic improvisation and a more dramatized theatrical improvisation. We met only twice before but have already enough shared understanding to go into these kind of things rather quickly. Most of the improvisations I stopped after a while keeping a straight and explorative attitude. I was preventing the drifting away on the music. How does freedom appears or sometimes disappears in these improvisations? Can we understand how and why? Those were the leading questions for the reflections in between. Related to different musical parameters our conversation circled all the time around the paradoxes of the rules giving space to freedom and freedom breaking the rules.

Step 4. To close the session I took a written reflection of one of the participants (Santiago) on ‘artistry’. He wrote the reflection after the last meeting. It is a very elaborate text as well reflective as artistic. Suddenly we were all silent rereading the text trying to come as close to what was written as we could. The exercise is about focussing and concentrating on what is really written in detail like you do with a score. Then you will experience that strong and extended ideas will open just from the square centimetre. This ending was also meant to encourage our selves to do these reflections this time again.

When we play or engage in conversation we reflect ‘in action’. When we do a conversation about what we just did we reflect ‘on action’. When we write a reflection afterwards we do an artistic reflection: we create, or we design.