KST participates in “City as Our Campus”

On Monday February 28, 2011, The Kelly Strayhorn Theater hosted a ‘City as our Campus‘ day for Winchester Thurston students.  Approximately 32 upper class students and 3 teachers joined us in the theater for a workshop on Sound Design, Text Re-Phrase and Voice as Meaning with artist Herman “SoySos” Pearl and KST Education Director Maritza Mosquera.  We used Pearl’s artwork Named/Unnamed as a catalyst and structure for thinking. Students worked for two hours on elements of collage, cut-up, and editing. They mixed words, sound, and meaning using contemporary contexts derived from American news media and everyday sounds.

ABOUT: Named/Unnamed is a sound/image/movement installation that conceptually realizes the enormous loss of life resulting from the violence of the war in Iraq. An immersive, sensorial experience, Named/Unnamed connects audiences with the nameless and faceless people largely ignored in the central consciousness of American culture.  Check out an excerpt of it here!

ABOUT: The Workshop

Participants explored ideas of sound capture, repetition, collage, identity, and the news media by creating personal sound narratives in collaboration with one another and presented these to their peers. The array of found and personal sounds, images, and newspaper texts were used to create four unique sound works.

ARRIVAL:

WORKING:

STUDENT CREATIONS:

Let’s Do This
SSSSSSK
Tremmel’s Dream
Typical Monday

PHRASE/RE-PHRASE:

STUDENT FEEDBACK:

We asked students to give us feedback; here are some of their answers:

What was your favorite part of today?

“Let’s do this!”, track making, both activities, hearing the finished sound, cutting out words, making newspaper headlines, listening to the sounds created, the audio mixing, working with Herman, audio, hearing our voices, listening, the collage, sound editing

Were the activities interesting?

Yes, because it was something I had never done before.
Yes, I like how they (the projects) were linked.
Yes it forced us to do things I never thought about
Yes, I learned a lot
Yes, because it was interesting
Yes, because we created our own thing

WORDS: Students describe the program

Interactive and fun, interesting, different, they worked together, hands on, unexpected, cool, engaging, different, audience interactive, out of the ordinary, engaging, new, artistic in a new way, new way of thinking, working together, process, evoked creativity.