PLEASE NOTE THAT THE VENUE HAS CHANGED. THESE EVENTS WILL NOW TAKE PLACE AT:
53 Colvestone Crescent, London, E8 2LG.
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This Spring 2019, the Song Collectors Collective invites you to Lore School…
Lore School is a new workshop series (3 sessions in total) focusing on the skills and lore of song collecting, storytelling, fieldwork and other ‘bardic arts’, from many of the finest practitioners working today.
Each monthly session we will have two special guests, each sharing:
‘How I Learnt the Lore’ – an informal talk exploring a personal journey, looking at creative and professional development, and best practice
Followed by ‘Laying Down the Lore’ – a knowledge exchange, sharing song/s, stories, rituals or skills of personal significance, passed on to the group for safekeeping and further transmission
Lore School will take place at 53 Colvestone Crescent, London, E8 2LG, 10.30am-2pm.
£15 per session (£10 concession).
£40 for all three sessions – please email scc@thenestcollective.co.uk.
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LORE SCHOOL SESSION #1 – FIELD
Sunday 3 February 2019
A day of storytelling, folklore and theatre with Hugh Lupton and Debs Newbold.
Hugh Lupton is one of Britain’s leading storytellers. Hugh’s interest in traditional music, in street theatre, in live poetry, and in myth, resulted in him becoming a professional storyteller in 1981 (there were perhaps half a dozen in Britain at the time), working largely in schools. In 1985 he formed the Company of Storytellers with Ben Haggarty and Pomme Clayton with a view to taking storytelling to adult audiences (until that point it had been perceived as an art-form for children). He has toured Africa and South America for the British Council and regularly performs in Europe and the USA. He has published several collections of folk-tales including the award winning Tales of Wisdom and Wonder described by the Independent as ‘Lucid and haunting… a book to treasure.’ He has appeared on radio and television (most recently Late Junction on radio 3, Something Understood on BBC Radio 4, King Arthur on the Discovery Channel and Beowulf for the Open University on BBC 2).
Debs Newbold is a theatre artist based in London and West Yorkshire. She is an actor, director and performance storyteller working across a range of theatre forms, with a love of work that playfully explores performer-audience relationships. Debs writes powerful one woman shows, sometimes directs them, and tours them internationally. Her work puts the poetic and the irreverent side by side, and often mixes modern theatre forms with the intimacy and informality of storytelling. Her work as an actor and director has seen her in collaboration with companies such as the BBC, Red Ladder, Shakespeare’s Globe, Rose Theatre Kingston, the Royal Opera House, Half Moon Theatre and Draycott-Trimm. Her solo pieces have played venues as diverse as the Royal Opera House, the British Library, the Southbank Centre, Hay Festival and Shakespeare’s Globe theatre, as well as many prestigious theatres and festivals in the UK, US and Europe.
Sunday 3 March 2019
A day of singing and song collecting with Fay Hield and Nathaniel Mann.
Fay Hield is a renowned folk singer and academic. Her solo albums, Looking Glass (2010), Orfeo (2012), and Old Adam (2016) have won many accolades, including a nomination for the Horizon Award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. In 2013, Fay helped put together the folk supergroup The Full English, conceived to celebrate the bringing together of folk song collections by the English Folk Song and Dance Society through creation of the most comprehensive and searchable database of British folk songs, tunes, dances, and customs. Alongside performing, Fay is lecturer in Ethnomusicology and Music Management at the University of Sheffield.
Nathaniel Mann is a sound artist, composer and folk singer. Garnering a reputation for creating vibrant responses to museums and their collections, “a fluid unfolding of the museum experience”, (ATTN: Magazine) his varied works incorporate site specific performances, interventions and installations. He is best known for his work with avant-folk ensemble Dead Rat Orchestra, who specialize in site-specific performances in unorthodox venues which challenge traditional concert settings. Nathaniel has made ambisonic field recordings in the Faroe Islands, and in collaboration with artist and communities in the Xingu Indigenous reservation, Brazil. Nathaniel was the Sound and Music’s Embedded Composer in Residence at Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum and Oxford Contemporary Music. He is a 2018 Arts Foundation Fellow.
LORE SCHOOL SESSION #3 – FOREST
Sunday 7 April 2019
A day of travel, exploration and fieldwork with Bruce Parry and Alice Rudge
Bruce Parry is an English explorer, trek leader, award-winning documentarian, indigenous rights advocate, author, and former Royal Marines commando officer. His documentary series for the BBC – Tribe, Amazon, and Arctic – have reached millions of people, and shown Bruce exploring extreme environments, living with remote indigenous peoples and highlighting many of the important issues being faced on the environmental frontline. He employs an ethnographic style and a form of participant observation for his documentaries.
Alice Rudge has spent 18 months doing participant observation fieldwork with the Batek hunting and gathering people in the lowland rainforests of Malaysia, where she learned to speak Batek fluently, as well as making many recordings of sound/music etc. Her research looked at how Batek people use sound to allow them to communicate emotionally with other kinds of beings, specifically as a medium for human communications with non-humans (e.g. plants/birds/animals/insects/ghosts/meteorological phenomena etc.) She is now doing a research project at the British Library, where she is looking at how to understand egalitarian social relations (common in hunting and gathering societies) through the musical practices of these groups, and reflecting on the ethics of recording and archiving with egalitarian hunting and gathering communities.
