Stet Lab

As I approached The Roundy on Monday night, alarm bells were a ringing. “Surely someone will silence that alarm?” thought I. Ha ha, how optimistic. The power of the universe wasn’t with me unfortunately, and 50 minutes later, as Piaras Hoban, Francis Heery, Áine Mangaoang and I began our masterpiece, the alarm was still sounding. All the time we were loud I didn’t worry about it, but in those intense moments of quiet electronic bleeps and eery violin sounds, my skin would crawl at the idea that this piercing alarm was intruding.

However, listening back to our set, the alarm seems happy out sitting there in the background like a ground bass; for those that maybe had headphones in as they arrived and didn’t hear the alarm could be mistaken for thinking that maybe Piaras or Francis was sampling an alarm as an under-pinning part of our improvisation: It just fits in.

So, why was it annoying me? I think it’s because I love control. (Why then am I interested in performing improvisation?) I wasn’t in control of the alarm: one could argue that I wasn’t in control of my fellow improvisers, but my argument to that is, if I wanted to I could have pulled the plug and prevented power. Also as we were an ensemble my input had a consequence on what happened (especially with what Piaras was doing because i was linked to his computer). Likewise he was in control of what happened with my input so it was almost like equilibrium.

However, the alarm just butted in and gatecrashed the party, and diva here couldn’t tell it to go away.

All in all I was happy with the outcome of our 30 minutes, we seemed very together and sympathetic to each other. Leading up to the night, I was aprehensive, when we had gotten together to ‘jam’, I just wasn’t feeling it and was anxious as to what would happen on the night. However, I just went with it, asked the lads what I could do and what I couldn’t do and took their advice—after all the outcome was in their hands.