Social Acoustics: Liz Barry, Thomas Hilder, Wolfgang Schmid, Jill Halstead & Soledad Marambio
Performance + film
Fredag 19. august
19:30 - 22:00
gratis inngang!
Elizabeth Barry
Dementia, Performance and the Art of Laughter
This talk considers the art of speaking and listening as it is practised by those living with dementia, exploring the intersubjective nature of such interactions, and in particular the way that laughter functions in them.
Elizabeth Barry is professor of modern literature in the Department of English at the University of Warwick. She works in the fields of modern literary studies, medical humanities and literary age studies, and has published widely on representations of ageing in the work of writers such Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, and Alice Munro, as well as in contemporary North American fiction. She has also held two UK government grants to think about connections between modernist literature and medicine. She edited the English Association's 2020 volume Literature and Ageing with Margery Vibe Skagen and is currently writing a monograph on ageing and time in modern literature and thought, to appear with Bloomsbury in 2023.
Wolfgang Schmid and Jill Halstead
On Music Therapy at the end of life, doing loss and bereavement
What is loss? How can we cope with it or begin to make sense of it and the life changing transitions it brings? In this talk we will explore our ongoing work into shared listening and music making and the possibilities it can create for sharing pain and loss in moments when lived experienced is beyond words. We will draw on examples from two current projects which explore experimental modes of presenting research in the field of music therapy.
“Last(ing) Music” (Schmid and Halstead 2022) is an illuminated essay which focuses on a series of music therapy sessions with Kari, a 49 year old woman who was terminally ill. The piece addresses Kari´s relationship with a particular song, “The Boy from Ipanema” and how through joint listening and music making Kari was able to share the indescribable and temporarily reconnect to those caring for her. Anatomy of Loss (Halstead and Schmid 2022) is an autoethnographic account of our shared process of “doing loss” over a 12-month period. The piece uses a “body stories” approach where dialogue takes the form of musical improvisation, images, text and gestural modalities which express the shared transformation we experienced when we each lost one of our parents within the same week in February 2021. Anatomy of loss offers perspectives on the interconnectedness of experience, and how identities are entangled through collective body memories, relational rituals and repertoire.
Wolfgang Schmid is a musician and music therapist, trained at the Hochschule for Music and Theatre in Munich and at the University of Witten-Herdecke in Germany. He is Professor of Music Therapy at the Grieg Academy, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen in Norway, and holds a part-time position as music therapist at Haukeland University hospital where he works with people in end-of-life care. He has 25 years of experience as music therapy practitioner-researcher in interdisciplinary intensive and palliative care, with autistic children and persons with dementia. Currently, Wolfgang is co-investigator in the interdisciplinary, international research project Social Acoustics at the University of Bergen, and the international multi-sited research project Care for Music, an international collaboration of the Universities of Exeter (UK) and Bergen, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK).
Jill Halstead is a writer and musician. Her work is interdisciplinary, feminist and focuses on the gender politics of musical creativity and participation. Her most recent work aligns with the transdisciplinary field of health humanities. A central concern of the field is the advancement of quality of life and relationships through the arts and humanities in ways that both complement and contrast with those of medicine and therapy. Recent composition work includes a series of screendances, participatory workshops and live dance theatre performances exploring the social taboos of ageing and loss. She is professor at the Grieg Academy, University of Bergen and leader of the Grieg Research School in Interdisciplinary Music Studies, a regional consortium of five universities located on the west coast of Norway. With Brandon LaBelle she currently leads the artistic research project Social Acoustics: Sound, Embodiment, Community.
Thomas Hilder
Autoethnographic tales of LGBTQ+ choral performance in Warsaw, London and Rome
“I would like to share fragments of my own experiences as LGBTQ+ choral scholar and activist. An LGBTQ+ choral scene emerged in the late 1970s as part of the swells of post-Stonewall activism that recognised both the importance of creating safer spaces for, and greater wider social visibility of LGBTQ+ people. My involvement with choirs through my research in London, Rome and Warsaw and through community engagement in Trondheim over the last 6 years, has revealed the significance of these choirs for offering community music therapy, creating national and international networks of queer solidarity, and not least providing messy fora where internal divisions within a so-called queer community are worked through. The stories I share in this presentation draw very much on autoethnographic experiences in Warsaw, London, and Rome from the last 6 months as choral rehearsals, concerts, and festivals were relaunched. Along the way, I will reflect upon the notion of concert, listening, social interventions, infrastructure building, pandemics, and the social acoustics of LGBTQ+ rights in Europe in the year 2022.”
Thomas R. Hilder is a writer, teacher, researcher, musician, activist, and associate professor in ethnomusicology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). His experiments in scholarship, pedagogy, and community engagement explore musical performance, community, activism, well-being, virtuality, and the body, shaped by feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives. He is author of “Sami Musical Performance and the Politics of Indigeneity in Northern Europe” (2015) and co-editor of “Music, Indigeneity, Digital Media” (2017). In 2016 he co-founded the international LGBTQ+ Music Study Group and currently acts as chair. At the Department of Music at NTNU he runs the EDI group RILM. He helped build Trondheim’s queer choir, Kor Hen, and is currently committee member.
Soledad Marambio
De mi sangre: un ensayo sobre la menopausia
(About my Blood: An Essay about Menopause)
This documentary is an exploration of what connects a mother, a daughter and a granddaughter with the women accused of being witches and burned for it. Through collages, interviews, and quotes it reflects on the ageing female body, on the silences and shame that surround it, but also on the possibility of celebrating it, of turning it into a space of encounter.
Soledad Marambio is a Chilean writer and translator and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bergen's Ageing Project. Her work has appeared in Granta, Birmingham Poetry Review and Words Without Borders among others. Her last book Subjects of Desire: An Exploration of Amateur Translation was published in 2021 by De Gruyter and her previous documentary Pieces of Memory: A Conversation with Sylvia Molloy was completed in 2019.