If Water Was Pink
Interdisciplinary composition · Composer & Project Lead · 2026
And, What Do You Do? was a three-strand interdisciplinary project developed across dance, acting and text, and music technology. Each strand began from a shared visual stimulus, but developed through a different encounter, allowing another practice, person or process to shape what emerged before substantial musical decisions were fixed.
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If Water Was Pink developed through the Acting & Text strand with actor and writer Eleanor Stephenson. Eleanor responded to the stimulus through story, writing and improvisation, and my musical material emerged later through listening to how she inhabited and delivered the text. Her pacing, emphasis, hesitation and emotional interpretation became compositional information.
If Water Was Pink
Stimulus to story
Eleanor’s first response to the shared visual stimulus was to imagine a story. We developed that response through conversation, writing and improvisation, allowing the dramatic material to take shape before I made substantial musical decisions.
A child’s perspective gradually became central to the work, changing the scale and emotional focus of the scene. At this stage, my role was to listen to how Eleanor was shaping character, language and dramatic pacing, and to let those choices establish the context from which the composition would later develop.
Stimulus: Acrylic painting by Damien - out of boredom.
Highlighted script showing Eleanor's annotations detailing change on emotional tone.
Text to performance
Once Eleanor began speaking the text aloud, it revealed things that were not apparent on the page alone. Her pacing, emphasis, breath, hesitation and changes in tone all altered how individual moments were understood.
Her embodied and felt knowledge as a performer became important here. Meaning was carried not only by the words themselves, but by how she inhabited them: where she gave a line weight, where she held back, and how a pause or shift in delivery changed the emotional direction of the scene.
Finding the music
Eleanor recorded herself delivering the text and I used that performance as the first substantial starting point for the score. Listening back repeatedly, I improvised at the piano alongside her voice, paying close attention to pace, breath, emphasis, hesitation and changes in emotional weight. I wanted the musical material to grow from the performance as it had actually been delivered, rather than from an abstract reading of the text.​​​​
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Improv on text from 1st workshop.
Notes from improv based on delivery of text.
Those details began to influence specific compositional decisions. A pause could create space rather than invite another gesture; a hesitation might delay an entrance; a shift in vocal intensity could change the register, density or harmonic weight around a line. The rhythm of the speech also affected how quickly musical ideas needed to move or settle.
This process made Eleanor’s performance part of the compositional material itself. I was not simply accompanying spoken text; I was listening for the musical possibilities already present in how the character was being embodied and expressed, and using those qualities to shape the score’s pacing, gesture and emotional direction.
Refined musical structure from improv material.
Working score with MT style cues.
The process became increasingly reciprocal. Eleanor’s original delivery had generated the first musical ideas, but once the music returned to the scene, her performance created new information again. That led me to adjust pacing, texture, transitions and, at times, to remove material altogether where the acting was already carrying the weight of the moment.
Bringing the music back
Once the first musical material had developed, I brought it back into the acted scene and tested it with Eleanor in performance.
This immediately exposed a different set of questions. Her timing, physical actions and delivery could shift from one run to the next, so the music could not simply sit underneath the scene as a fixed layer.I began using cue points, repeated material and flexible transitions, allowing particular words, actions or changes in dramatic energy to guide the score. This meant the music could remain structurally clear while still giving Eleanor space to shape the scene through performance.
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Rehearsal and filming day.
What changed
The collaboration developed as a loop: Eleanor’s writing and performance generated musical material; that material returned to the scene; her subsequent performance then created further information that could change the score.Some moments became stronger when I did less.
Silence gained weight, actions needed more time, and musical gestures could become unnecessary when the performance itself was already carrying the dramatic information.
Eleanor’s contribution therefore changed not only the surface character of the music, but its shape, timing and emotional logic. The final work emerged through the relationship between writing, embodied performance and musical response.