Action-packed afternoon starting with group presentations by the participants - responding to Ross' workshop. These are clever, inventive, full of ideas - like enacted sketchbooks - showing how the participants have been taking on board ideas from the workshops and letting them pile up and feed into their work.



During the afternoon Ross is working on his own presentation - 16 Essays on Composing - which takes place at 6.0, with a larger audience from across the School. Although this DVD is mainly a documentation of a touring production of the Third Man, for which Ross wrote the music, it is also a testament to the power of live theatre, since the 16th Essay is always different, and relates to the particular circumstances in which the DVD is shown. Acknowledging the presence of the audience, and the particular circumstances in which any showing of the work is made, the 16th essay deliberately heightens these, and draws attention to this element of the performance. Entering for what we expected to be a more or less straightforward research presentation, the audience found the studio in darkness, and felt their way forward to find a place to sit down. At the back of the studio, a hooded figure (Ross), seated in a small pool of light, mumbled into a microphone, and continued to speak quietly throughout the showing of the work. Gradually becoming accustomed to the dark, a trail of dead leaves and debris from the afternoon showings could be seen leading between the seated audience, from the hooded figure to the projector, positioned closer to the screen. Ross offered a further insight into his work at the end of the session when he explained how his approach to the work had been influenced by his father's medical condition, and diminishing memory, at the time - how the themes which he had pursued in his composition correlated with the limited number of topics he was able to discuss with his father at the time. The cascading individual words which had been a feature of the DVD artefact suddenly acquired a new meaning. It feels to me absolutely right for a practitioner to be so clearly influenced in his decision-making process by such strong emotional and familial events.