Mittwoch, 9. November 2011

Recap: One Band Stand Workshop & Performance







CREDITS:

One Band Stand: "The Paradox of Feminism"
Saturday November 5th, 2011
Concept/Creative Director/Instructor: Ihu Anyanwu (www.electrohammam.com)
Participants: Sylvie Weber | Karolina Jawad | Eva Derschmidt
Performance Concept/Artistic Direction: Wally Salner (fabrics interseason)
Sound Engineer: Jakub Velikovsky
Photos Credits: Andrea Lumplecker
Presented by Sessions On/ SCHOOL (sessionson.blogspot.com)


RECAP: ONE BAND STAND WORKSHOP & PERFORMANCE - PARADOX OF FEMINISM
My main concept for One Band Stand is to train novices in electronic music production during a bootcamp style workshop (occurring several straight days of training), leading up to a "band" performance for "one night only."

Within the context of SCHOOL and the workshop series "Sessions On," One Band Stand was asked to expand its concept to include a localized theme - "The Paradox of Feminism." In addition, I invited a guest lecturer - Wally Salner, to elaborate on the "Paradox..." theme based on her extensive knowledge of feminist theory.

This conceptual expansion, which was organized spontaneously and ad hoc, led to the surprising result that this particular episode of One Band Stand evolved into a live "conceptual" performance. By that I mean it was not just a musical event, due to the theme, we developed a creative approach to presenting the songs, which included "performative action," visual coding (projected text, styling consideration), and feminist references.

This all came about via a process of active methodology (discussions about the theme, blogging, Wally's intervention, production training), which allowed musical and creative strategies to form in a cool way. For 5 straight days the workshop participants completely committed themselves to hard nosed study, and were open, for the most part, to the prescribed non-musical aspects of participation.

As evidenced by the songs that the participants made - music production-wise - the workshop was a success because, as one can hear, there is nice musicality, expression and style in the final compositions. Also as mentioned before, by incorporating a "theme" and bringing in an expert guest from a different discipline, the project was able to expand beyond the dimension of musical performance, and because of this, the performance event was also a conceptual success. As a result, I am excited to see the ways in which One Band Stand will continue to expand beyond music and experiment/explore its parameters of presentation in the future.

In the end, the band did not perform together musically. I under estimated the time required to fulfill the training part of the project. I now know that we would have needed at least another few days (in addition to the 5 days mentioned) to jam and rehearse together, in order to establish a decent collaborative set. For the future I will have to adjust the time outline of the workshop.

Thanks and gratitude to SCHOOL/Sessions On, Andrea Lumplecker, Wally Salner, Sylvie Weber, Karolina Jawad, Eva Derschmidt, Jakub Velikovsky & Dominik Traun.

- Ihu Anyanwu


PERFORMANCE CONCEPT: ONE BAND STAND - PARADOX OF FEMINISM
For the presentation of the performance One Band Stand: The Paradox of Feminism, the performative setting showed the „Making of“ a feminist workshop in music production - where the students introduce their final work to the audience.
Therefore we showed the original environment of SCHOOL – as a classroom setting with its formal "arrangements" e.g. frontdesk, powerpoint projections, instructor, feminist students in school uniform (hairdo suffragette), laptops, head-set etc. - leaving the contextual and formal remnants on the stage.
- Wally Salner
ONE BAND STAND - MUSIC:

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