dear everyone,
as you can imagine, all activities of the Genetic Choir that relate to physically being together, in training or with an audience, have been postponed at the moment.
Concretely, this means cancelling the Space Sound Bodies workshop and postponing the Friday morning sessions of March/April. Also the Huis van Lied en Geluid activities are postponed for now. We hope that in June we can start again, and that the Edge of Language workshop can happen as planned.
For May, we were involved in organising the Improvisation Festival in Berlin (WhatIIIF2020), which we will postpone to 2021 for the physical meeting, and we are thinking of creating an online improvised festival for the coming month(s). If it happens, we will let you know.
And here some more thoughts, for in the waiting state:
IMPROVISED WORLD
It is not the world’s choice, and the situation is severe, but it is also worth considering that these are big times for improvisation, from small to big : parents with their children, self-employed people, businesses, care organisations, governments, everyone is improvising – we have no choice.
Here’s the serious side of improvisation, as improvisation is, as you know from training, so much more than just being playful:
How to act and react inside a context that is completely new to us and has many unsure variables that we cannot control? How to make choices that are bold, enriching and constructive for you and your environment in order to let new structures emerge?
Governments and care organisations are improvising on the very edge of the knife, having to make decisions with incomplete data daily that effect (current or future) life and death of a lot of people. But also the rest of us is asked to improvise, find new (daily) meaning for our lives while being mainly at home, create new structures and warm experiences for ourselves and the ones that are close to us, while the times are uncertain.
MAKING MUSIC DURING CORONA
To create live music together is such a strong, life-giving force, and it seems that we will run short of it in the coming months, although there are a lot of examples that could inspire us to initiate live music in our own neighbourhood: There are the balcony/window concerts that we saw starting in Italy, there is howling together as wolves every evening at a set time (in the US). Do you know of any other nice examples of creating live music in Corona times?
Seems like these are times when you could get to know your neighbours in a different way than you would have done without this crisis, by for example asking them if they want to sing with you from their windows? 😀
As long distance (online) making live music together is concerned, things are a bit more complicated for improvisers because of the time-latency during online calls. But it is not impossible for some kinds of music at least…. Maybe there are some technology savvy improvisers who have found good ways, or will develop this now that the need is higher than usual.
For any of the above, we are curious to hear thoughts, links and inspiration from you, if you like. Get in touch by any method you know, or via: info@genetic-choir.org
Wishing everyone out there health, happiness and music in these trying times!
xxx
Thomas
