Monday 23rd May 2011
This week at The Firebird Trust has been one of the slower weeks we’ve experienced so as much as I’d love to recount and epic tale of adventure and merriment, I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you disappointed. Monday started, as ever, with the FBT staff meeting, business as usual and not much to report on this front really. Aside from a spot of web related talk, helping Robin with the Tumblr site, we took part in individual feedback sessions with Liam; reflecting on all the work we’ve done so far at the trust, what we’ve liked, what we’ve disliked and what we’d like to do in the future. In terms of future work we all agreed that developing the musician/dancer improvisation workshop is a definite goer and that we’d like to carry on developing a solid relationship with the after school club in Binbrook, both of which you can read about in previous blog entries.
On Monday afternoon the dream team was split! Pete stayed at the office while I went to Welbourn to shadow Tim Walker’s guitar lessons as did Pete two weeks previously. The sessions were individual twenty minute sessions, very different to the multiple participant, half-hour to fourty-five minute sessions we’ve been used to observing. In principle Tim’s way of working was no different to the larger sessions, the essence of this being to convey your knowledge in the simplest and clearest of terms. As I often mention, observing the teaching process in these sessions gives one a great insight into the psychology of working with children, a point that was reiterated in my mind was that of giving your participants choice in what they want to explore as it gives them a sense of ownership over what they are doing.
Tuesday 24th May 2011
Web design again….yes! This is becoming somewhat of a recurring theme but it’s one that is important non-the-less. Today’s mini web task was to produce mock-ups for the layout of individual pages within the website, specifically the ‘about us’ and ‘contacts’ page, along with this we were also asked to think about the content we would want to see included on these pages.
For the latter half the day we embarked on a new practical concept at Liam’s ‘gaff’ as he now likes to call it. Although we’ve mentioned the use of words, phrases in creating music before, it’s not something we’ve looked at in any real depth. With a set of “magnetic fridge poetry we set to work creating some phrases…some sensible and some not so sensible. Once we had our selection of phrases we set about exploring the different ways in which we could read them out, essentially creating character voices. The reasoning behind us doing this was to explore ways in which people can disassociate performance from their own persona, thus leaving any of their personal insecurities behind.
Wednesday 25th May 2011
Today we became postmen. Yes, you read correctly. As part of Liams varying work in the community, he, Frances, Annie and Tim Walker are holding a family ceilidh in Welbourn over 28th and 29th of May (the upcoming weekend) as we are going to be helping out at this event we spent the latter part of the morning delivering flyers to pretty much every house in the village, hopefully it shall be a well-attended event!
Wednesday afternoon entailed a continuation of the previous day’s practical work using words and phrases to create music. Having had a night to mull over ideas a few possibilities arose, the most basic idea; create a phrase and then play rhythms to the syllables. This has an advantage in that the phrase doesn’t have to make any sense at all and relies on the rhythm of the words rather than their meaning. One of the more involved ideas that arose involved more in the way of story-telling. The basic premise of this exercise would be to create phrases and sentences based around a theme or story, the story would then be read and a soundscape created to go along with it. The great advantage of this exercise is that it doesn’t have to involve and kind of structured music, rather the focus is on creating sounds or noises that convey the content of mood of the story as it develops.
Summary
As stated at the beginning of the blog, this was one of slower weeks for us here at the trust. This said we did make progress, finding a new avenue of exploration for our workshops, as well gaining and insight into one-on-one teaching and the implications pertaining to it. We also did our bit to help the community, spreading the awareness of music and dance based family activities in Welbourn. As ever a great week!
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The Firebird Trust
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX
01522 811229
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