Bristol-based illustrator Con McHugh's designs fuse jazz and animation. Working with clarinetist Adrian Cox, this collaboration is an experimental attempt to break away from conventional performance conventions, combining jazz improvisation with McHugh's playful imagination to create a unique stage.
The show took place in Bristol, and McHugh drew short looping animations to the music and projected them on stage. Scenes such as a snake swallowing a cowboy and turning into a gramophone, and spaghetti turning into musical notes, created an unpredictable immersion for the audience. “I picked up the pencil with the idea that the animation should flow like the music,” McHugh said. “I didn’t erase, I didn’t think, I just reacted.”
Originally, McHugh had planned to create a 90-second animation set to Cox’s song “Rehearsing for a Nervous Breakdown.” But as the deadline neared, he changed course and attempted a “visual improvisation” composed of several short, looping animations. “Like jazz, drawing had to be spontaneous,” he explains. “The fun came before the end result.”
