A newsletter about learning, working, creating and sometimes improv.

Hello dear reader! If you are new around these parts of the interweb, I welcome you. If you are a usual, I thank you for sticking around for what is officially the most erratic newsletter in the world!

Today’s Pigeon Post is more focused than usual, and somehow does echo to the one last quarter, or at least the Soundpainting project in it. I’ll tell you everything about what I’ve done, what I’m learning and what is planned for Soundpainting! Sound-what now? Read on to discover it!

As usual, feel encouraged to answer to this Pigeon Post with anything you want, and if you liked it, feel free to share it with your friends!

THE IMPROV SOUNDPAINTING CHATTER

Fine, it’s also improv-related somehow I guess, you got me there. But it’s also not at all your usual improvised theatre community, and it’s much more rooted in music and jazz than it is in theatre. At least for some!

Sounpiñataquoilà? What is this?

Soundpainting is a universal sign-language for multidisciplinary composition in real time. Boom, here is the official definition, as given by its creator Walter Thompson.

In practice, you can bring together many different disciplines on stage (actors, musicians, dancers, visual artists, singers, circus artists, etc.), and make a really killer show. The specificity of this shows is that it’s orchestrated (aka. soundpainted) by a person that sends different signs to the group to compose with all the disciplines and their artistic production.

Soundpainting can be used for a million applications—like improv can be used for so many things and artistically create so many varied results—but if you want to have a glimpse at what we did early May for a week, with a fabulous cast of international artists, take a couple of minutes and savour this trailer made by the fantastic Robyn Berk.

What I love the most about Soundpainting is how we can get fantastic specialized performers to work together through a common language without them having to compromise on their work, skills, discipline—or without having to spend a lifetime dedicating our work not only to our artform, but also to all of the others.

The stars aligned for this series of shows, and we succeeded to bring together artists from all over that have super busy schedules, so I can’t be grateful enough to them and the rest of the team for trusting me with this project! This season was only the start of Soundpainting Project, and I cannot wait to work more with this as a soundpainter, in parallel of my unscripted theatre activities.

As a little teaser, you will be able to admire a Soundpainting show on stage again in 2027, for two very special evenings of music, of theatre, of dance and more. Save the date: 30/04 & 01/05/2027!

How and why am I doing this?

I heard about Soundpainting for the first time about 16 years ago, at an international improv festival in France. I loved it, learnt a bit of it, and then because no one was doing it I forgot about it. Until I met again David Moncada who had started working with it in Bogotá, and I was reminded of its existence through a beautiful show in Portugal.

Since then, I’ve worked many times with David—in Amsterdam, in Bogotá and in other places—and we became good friends and colleagues. We even created a Soundpainting show together, Echoes, which we subtitle “a duo for many people”, mixing more traditional unscripted theatre techniques and soundpainting language to communicate with an ensemble of musicians, dancers and actors.

It still doesn’t say why I’m liking this! But the reality is that I can’t really explain why it speaks so much to me. Maybe because it makes me reconnect with my music years, or even my circus years? Because it’s creative and poetic and beautiful? Because it makes us work as a group, all in the same direction, putting the ego on the side, and I’m craving for uninterested collective spaces? I don’t know, but somehow my brain understands the language, its logic and the compositional aspect to it fairly instinctively, as if I finally found something that my weird mind was built for, while providing me with a healthy dose of intellectual focused challenge.

In short, I love it! Every time I watch it, it makes me think of aspects of life that feel deep and poetic. When I perform, I feel liberated from the pressure of being smart, interesting or entertaining. I’m even planning on picking back up my clarinet! And when I soundpaint, I feel very much in a state of flow, present, grounded, and truly connected with the others. It feels like the perfect complement to the improv I love: it keeps its essence, but can yield results that we couldn’t yield in improv—and vice-versa.

SOME LIFE SOUNDPAINTING STUFF

I love learning new things. If you’ve ever spent a bit of time with me, you know how I can easily get lost into rabbit holes of information—I still want to apologize to all the Pandora Festival teachers for spending 4 days listing French inventions at random moments after falling into that rabbit hole. This means that starting a (fairly) new discipline is a perfect way for me to dive deep into learning everything about Soundpainting.

Certification as a Soundpainter

Throughout the last season, I’ve been following a year-long education to be certified as a multidisciplinary soundpainter. This education—taking place in France—involves the creator of the language Walter Thompson himself, which I feel very lucky to be able to work with directly, some odd 52 years after he started creating the first signs for Soundpainting.

In this education, we worked for 100+ hours to establish the good practice around leading, teaching and composing with Soundpainting. It has been such an inspiring journey, and made me feel a bit like 20 years ago when I discovered improv: it’s a very vast and deep world out there, and this was only a starting point from which I can’t wait to spend my life exploring and learning! So. Much. To. Learn.

This week, I went to the countryside in France to learn some more from another soundpainter, Éric Chapelle. He is focusing his work on theatricality and stage presence in Soundpainting, which felt like a big parallel with the work Laura and I have been doing with Flock Theatre. It was quite an intense learning week, but immensely inspiring in its content! I learnt a lot, tried a lot of things, failed at some and succeeded at others, but mostly it felt like replenishing some of my creative jars that were dried up after a busy season of producing. Which was also what happened at the …

International Soundpainting Think Tank

In July, I was invited to join the annual think tank for soundpainters around the world. It brings together once a year soundpainters to work, exchange, discuss and keep the language as unified and universal as possible, while sharing in which directions it evolves and grows. This year, we were about 50 soundpainters invited who joined—ranging from Walter and the old guard to a couple of newer members like me—working together for a full week at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, just above New York City.

During the week, we workshopped—for instance the creation and applications of a new sign; we debated—amongst others on the perspective of a discipline-focused entry point into Soundpainting; we listened to conferences from fellow soundpainters—like the one on working with veterans to share their stories in order to raise awareness on the lack of care they receive from the USA’s government; we jammed a lot—with sometimes 50, sometimes just a dozen of performers in a beautiful concert hall with a gigantic organ, two Steinway grand pianos, and a loooot of space; and simply we shared, laughed, exchanged with each other at lunch, during a walk or hanging out late at night.

Besides the educational aspect and the professional development that came from it, it also was a truly beautiful human experience.

Personal Scholarship

Another great news for me to keep growing as an artist and a soundpainter, Walter offered a year-long personal scholarship to work directly with him over the entire next season. He usually offers one or two of those per year to help selected soundpainters develop and work on the craft, and I have the honour of being one of them!

All of that to say that Soundpainting is not going anywhere and is slowly settling in my life to stay, in parallel of all of the improv stuff I love to do, and truly feels like an additional career I’m adding to my work. It is a lot of time to take, quite a bit of money invest, and a huge amount of work, but it seems like diving head first and taking things seriously is my favorite way to do life, so it’s already being a lot of fun.

Like I was sharing in my Pigeon Post from April, it seems like this year is really reminding me what it is to be a theatre maker and a professional artist, and it feels good to be in touch with this part of me again. Stay tuned for more Soundpainting updates soon!

A BIG SOUNDPAINTING OL’ SHOUT OUT

I want to give this shout out to Laura—yeah, I know, again, but what can I say, she’s amazing!

Most of you know her personally, some of you know her through me, and maybe some of you have no clue who this Laura is. Well, Laura Doorneweerd-Perry is—besides being an amazing life partner—my co-director in Flock Theatre. This means a lot of things, from having made up the Flock Theatre name with me somewhere in New Dehli, to working about 365 days per year on our company.

In Flock, she is responsible for so many things I couldn’t even name them all. She’s our PR person, she’s catching us beautiful subsidies and partners to organise crazy events, she’s managing our school, she’s writing great newsletter to keep people informed about what is happening, etc. But also, she does a lot of the grind, the invisible work behind the scenes, the small things that « take just 5 minutes », or that « don’t need to think so much », except that you need someone to think about them, to care about them, and to actually do them. Well, that’s also Laura.

In Soundpainting, she’s done the same: she’s helped me produce a week-full of rehearsals, workshops and shows this year, embarking wholeheartedly and not counting her time, energy or beads of sweat. And especially this season she lead our gorgeous community project around Soundpainting: a series of 6 free workshops to bring together people from our community, local residents of Amsterdam-Noord, and refugees and migrants newly arrived in the Netherlands.

We scheduled short discovery workshops with a free dinner, and Laura literally made this possible on all levels: she got us all the support we needed—the financial income, the local community centers and their managers, the association working with refugees that we teamed up with, the caterers for the dinners, the translators (arabic, turkish, russian) and even some of the participants to the workshops! If you’re curious, look at the documentary that we made about it—Robyn did an amazing job again!

This project was really meaningful, and was based on a vague idea I had a while ago, but Laura took it and made it hers, brought it to life, and piloted it to a smooth landing with an incredible skill.

So if you like all the crazy stuff I do with Soundpainting, don’t forget to thank Laura too, she makes it possible, she supports the shit out of me, she basically bullied me into going to the Think Tank when I got invited—moving our weekend away so that I could go—and she just generally is an amazing human. Yep. I’m lucky.

A NEW SOUNDPAINTING PROJECT

If you aren’t yet bored of me talking about Soundpainting, you can check out the new little project I will be leading next year in Amsterdam: a few Laboratory sessions from September to December for anyone that would like to learn Soundpainting, work on their knowledge of the language, or practice it with fellow-minded artists.

In these 5 sessions of 3h, we will work on the syntax of Soundpainting, focus our technique on a family of signs, and compose together to create nice collective pieces! That’s a great way to discover what I’m talking about—you can even just join one session, but there is a solid discount if you commit to all five of them.

Also, it’s open to actors, to musicians, to dancers, and to potentially any other artistic discipline! So if you know someone who is a musician, a dancer, etc., send them the link to join a Lab session!

RANDOM THOUGHT

Aaaah, a session that’s not about Soundpainting, but about food!

This week, I was at the Soundpainting … darn, I guess it is a bit about it anyways. Let me start again. This week, I ate every lunch in a small restaurant called « Chez Marthe ». The name is in honour of its historical owner Marthe, who still lives in the village. It’s a simple place, family-run, and with simple food, but it encapsulate what I sometimes miss not living in France anymore, and our relationship to food.

Chez Marthe, you don’t really pick what you eat. You get served what they cook. Not a dish, no, but a meal. This means a starter, a main, a cheese platter, a dessert, a coffee, red wine, infinite fresh bread, and nice people bringing all this to the table. For a grand total of 17€. The food was uncomplicated but very tasty, and I absolutely loved that place. It attracts all the people from the neighbouring villages: usuals, workers, neighbours, family and friends, and us. It’s about sharing a moment, about sharing food, about sitting and chatting and being together just for a bit (aka. 1h30). And I love this.

I will leave you with this cheese platter, because I don’t think it needs any more comment.

Thanks for reading this Pigeon Post, and for sticking around all my tribulations! It has been an exhausting season, draining on many levels and making me doubt a lot of things, so I am happy to finally break a bit and be on a holidays. But it’s also been extremely rich and inspiring in some of the new endeavours I’ve started, and I’m looking forward to see where it leads me. As usual, if you want to chat, just hit the reply button, or if you prefer to silent-read, just do what makes you happy!

Take care, be kind and eat good food!

Gael