2024-2025 COOP study group ~ The Word and the Wound 2 / And Now You are Ready to Sing
Tutor team:
Guests:
Partner Institution:
If I Can't Dance I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution
Student participants:
TBA November 2024
Student led reflection:
Chronicles (COMING DECEMBER 2024)
Program:
Day to Day (COMING DECEMBER 2024)
The Word and the Wound 2 / And Now You are Ready to Sing
Introduction
We feel the need to begin this introduction to our COOP study with mentioning and acknowledging the work that has been done during the past academic year. We were blessed to work with an incredibly dedicated, talented, and sincere group of people – students and guest tutors – thinking together about practice. Within the broad research field of practice, we discovered voice as a place of encounter for both individual and collective practice, and this led us to focus our study on the practice of listening. Our first guest tutor, the Swedish composer Lisa Montan, invited us to participate in a workshop which she called “Song for Peace”. The workshop was based on the singing exercises Lisa had been learning from her vocal coach Birgitta Bergman – exercises she has been teaching for over 60 years (she is now 83 years old). These exercises from Birgitta that Lisa passed on to us, we kept practicing as a daily voice warm-up during the DAI confluences, and it also became the core of our final presentation during COOP SUMMIT 2024. Our second guest tutor was artist Angelo Custodio, who guided us in methods to expand and deepen the somatic elements present in voice.
For The Word and the Wound 2 / And Now You are Ready to Sing, we want to keep our focus on practice, and more specifically the element of listening therein. But we also want to extend this field of inquiry with the question what it means to write and perform a song. When we finished doing the warm-up, Lisa was always saying: “And now you are ready to sing”. As mentioned, we see the work in this academic year as a continuation of our research of the past one, and in keeping with the encouragement of Lisa we would like to depart from the phrase: “And now you are ready to sing”. We want to slightly reformulate it, and propose it as a question. What does it mean to be ready to sing? And what does it mean to sing with others? What is the relation between the individual voice and the voice of the group? How does it connect to the body, to (bodily) memory? What are the resonances of singing (together) – in time and space? In what way does singing mobilise our critical and artistic potential? We propose to think of singing, not only as an emanation of sound, but as an embodied practice of listening. Therefore, we would like to articulate the research around questions of acts of listening, (a)tuning, transmitting, testing and exercising with sounds, etc. We are interested in the somatic element of singing, as well as storytelling, folk traditions, the re-interpreting and re-writing of text, etc.
We would like to bring our attention to the relation between the performative and the restorative, thinking of the potential of performance to be a reparational practice. In her work Words to write it. The Word and the Wound (after which we named our study group) the Italian feminist Wanda Tommasi writes about the practice of writing as a process of symbolic creation that leads to repair. In that sense, each act of writing (or any other form of creative practice) is a return to, or a repetition of, something that has taken place in time and is thus a re-encounter. You can also see it as a possibility to inhabit new, other, multiple perspectives. We are proposing to investigate practices of reparation in which relationships of conflict, both personal and intergenerational, are transformed and in which difficult terrain can become a site for gaining freedom. Singing (or any other form of creative practice) is both, an intimate conversation with one’s own fragility, as an ongoing negotiation with inherited, collective histories and harm. We want to put value in listening (the art system still has difficulty with value) and we are committed to both, create time for meaningful encounters during the DAI confluences, as well as explore ways and methods to continue listening in our everyday life.
A way of working (together):
All these questions will be reflected in our way of working together. All participants, including us as tutors, are encouraged to take the study group as an opportunity to think about practice. Practice that preferably takes on a daily work-rhythm, but can take any other form: key is that it is about finding sustainable methodologies through which we enable ourselves to (continue) work(ing): work forms and rhythms that are tenable, affordable, bring pleasure, allow for and stimulate continued study, [allow for finding ways of working in a world in which we are confronted with unspeakable violation of human rights]. The way we interpret (collaborative) practice, is about developing a consciousness about, and an articulation of, the cultural/historical/social networks one is operating within and is formed by, that one wants to explore, unearth, and acknowledge, wants to learn from, exchange with, and contribute to.
We propose to organize our working-together-routine around five practices.
- Vocal warm-up
The warm-up is organized around posture, breathing, tuning, resonating, listening - both in relation to inner and outer space, listening to yourself, listening to others.
- Somatic exercises of breathing and listening
With the somatic exercises of breathing and listening, we are aiming to deepen our understanding of the connection between the voice and the body and to expand on our experience of that connection, as well as learning restorative practices. The relationship between performative and reparative practices.
- Thinking-in-assembly
Thinking-in-assembly is a research-based thinking practice that relates listening and thinking. It is our focus to pose and reflect on questions, deepening the quality of listening, and the relation between thinking and the voice of the group. It is also a place where we can bring new references and deepen the research topics through the relationship between ideas and personal experience. It is a place to experiment also with the relationship between thinking and storytelling.
- Face to face
We want to reserve ample time for individual one-to-one meetings and for collective gatherings reporting back to each other about finding out what you need to be able to work, to find the courage to work. In these meetings we can share what we have been doing, what was our plan, where we deviated, what worked and what not, and in doing so nourishing a constructive dynamic between individual practice and collaborative work.
- Student led
We are always including a student led component in the programme, in the form of readings, screenings, student-led workshops, etc. where the individual propositions can be articulated within the wider frame of the group and shared knowledge can enrich our perspectives and experiences.
- First gathering
We will start the study group with a day dedicated to presenting our practices to each other, so we get to know (aspects of) each other’s work.
- Final presentation
We imagine the final public presentation to be a group presentation in a form that reflects and stays close to the experiences and the processes of making throughout the year.
