Bettina Sheppard
Bettina Sheppard
3/31/20
Community Partner for Project:
My community “partner” is a group of individuals with the shared interest of how to best communicate with each other and the world around us through art, specifically music and dance, during this time of health crisis. Some of the members of this group originally belonged to a music ensemble I created in 2008 called Bridges Vocal Ensemble. Although we are now scattered around the globe, Bridges was a group to unify many cultures through music, using our different languages in harmony. I have called upon some of the Bridges singers and dancers to participate in this project. Members represent ethnicities and nationalities of African American, Native American, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Polish, Indian, German, Swiss, Jamaican, Greek, and Dutch. The group age range within the group has been 18-57 years old, and has also supported those with both physical and emotional challenges. The artists are united by the common threads of artistic proficiency at a professional level (no longer a requirement,) curiosity about other cultures, a desire to communicate with those willing to hear about how to blend our cultures in a way that also promotes and protects the uniqueness of each culture, proactive response to need, and a very gentle kindness toward those who are different, challenged, or just within a minority. Within the group, there are subgroups of those who compose music or choreograph, those who have stronger technical skills, and those who are section leaders for learning new material. The group has changed many times over the years due to the international status of members and visa issues. Most wanted to stay in the US and were not allowed. During the Trump administration many have been denied visa renewal who had been here for twenty years or more.
In creating a video and audio platform, I am hoping to offer a gathering place for mutual support and artistic expression. The act of creating music together fulfills a primary need for musicians to make music and maintain a sense of identity and self-worth. I have already begun receiving people’s recordings and then meeting on Zoom to hear how they fit together. So far, it’s quite awful musically, which makes us all laugh and enjoy the process of learning how to sync our recordings. One participant is a Rockette who left for Florida, and she was dancing in the background!
We will use one or more of the songs I’ve identified in the Alan Lomax collection of field recordings. The songs I’ve chosen are spirituals and folk melodies, pieces that have been used in other times of crisis, such as the Civil Rights movement. These folk tunes have a strong emotional response for unity and healing, as well as expressing grief. The very act of singing together is answering our need be together even with social distancing. I hope to be of help in offering the community of online singing to anyone who wants to join, not just those already established as singers and/or dancers. Those who’ve joined already have said how much fun it is, which is pretty powerful these days!
Digital Methodology
1) Method:
Merriam-Webster defines method differently depending on the desired outcome, such as a presentation of instructional material or the means of acquiring a skill. I find particularly useful the first definition:
- : a procedure or process for attaining an object: such as
: a way, technique, or process of or for doing something
I believe that method, as it relates to the goals of this project, will be an exploration and organization of archival material in conjunction with a systematic set of questions in current interviews.
2) My digital methods will include online research in established archives, such as The Library of Congress and The National Archives (https://www.archives.gov/research/immigration) as well as interviews conducted and recorded on Zoom. I also hope to use recording and video devises (could be as simple as a phone) that participants can use to send an audio and/or video file.
3) How to extend the research of a previously activated archive: I’d like to track some of the emotional responses from the existing video collection and catalogue similarities in other marginalized groups. Specifically, I want to see how music and dance have created a positive emotional response to extreme adversity, and how music is used to both heal and create community. Since we can’t help but relate to what’s happening now for all of us, I’ll concentrate on AIDS/virus/health issues and also immigration/race/ethnicity issues – how did/do people in these groups cope using music?
4) I plan to work in smaller chunks of time for one thing. I tend to focus on a project and stay up until 3am to keep working. We’ve all become aware of how fragile our health can be when we might have taken it for granted before. It’s time to take care! Taking care of both the class and the community mean practicing total forgiveness, understanding, and compassion for anyone’s needs and responses. This won’t be a time to worry about strictly adhering to what we anticipated in performing research. I plan to stay as flexible as possible regarding my own responses and those of others.
Archive Report
I will be researching methods people have used to continue their lives and use creativity to respond to a crisis. Specifically, I’m interested in how musicians and dancers have used art to reflect their world, whether in commentary, escape, or a means for hope and positivity.
I’d like to focus on a sense of being ignored or marginalized, which will include nationality, race and ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation.
Musicians, composers, and choreographers have used events, some of which are outlined in:
https://archive.org/details/OTRR_American_History_Singles
Archives for immigration research can be found at The National Archives (https://www.archives.gov/research/immigration)
I’m still exploring various sources of archival material, such as the Smithsonian and other museums that have sponsored research. But I’d like to concentrate on the field recordings of Alan Lomax. The archives (an archive 2.0) are now in the American Folklife Center division of The Library of Congress. His earlier recordings were housed in The Association for Cultural Equity (http://research.culturalequity.org) which also contains a wonderful archive called The Global Jukebox, “a growing space to connect with our deep heritage through the expressive arts of singing, dancing, and conversing from around the world.” The ACE contains archives of Welsh folk music (my first archive report.)
The Sound Recordings catalog comprises over 17,400 digital audio files, beginning with Lomax’s first recordings onto (newly invented) tape in 1946 and tracing his career into the 1990s. In addition to a wide spectrum of musical performances from around the world, it includes stories, jokes, sermons, personal narratives, interviews conducted by Lomax and his associates, and unique ambient artifacts captured in transit from radio broadcasts, sometimes inadvertently, when Alan left the tape machine running. Not a single piece of recorded sound in Lomax’s audio archive has been omitted: meaning that microphone checks, partial performances, and false starts are also included.
This material from Alan Lomax’s independent archive, begun in 1946, which has been digitized and preserved by the Association for Cultural Equity, is distinct from the thousands of earlier recordings on acetate and aluminum discs he made from 1933 to 1942 under the auspices of the Library of Congress. This earlier collection — which includes the famous Jelly Roll Morton, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Muddy Waters sessions, as well as Lomax’s prodigious collections made in Haiti and Eastern Kentucky (1937) — is the provenance of the American Folklife Center at the Library. Attempts are being made, however, to digitize some of this rarer material, such as the Haitian recordings, and to make it available in the Sound Recordings catalog. Please check in periodically for updates.
After exploring these archives, I’d like to choose one or two of the songs from the archive, preferably from the Civil Rights protest era, and create a track to send to people from the U.S. as well as other countries. Each singer or dancer will send back a recording of themselves using this track, which I can then edit into a sort of quilt, becoming an archive 3.0. I will also collect a current collection of interviews, music, and dance reels from people regarding their response to the current health crisis and how it relates to past crises. So far, the set of interviews will include several Asian musicians and dancers, a black activist choreographer, and a Belgian/Moroccan dancer who was diagnosed HIV positive over 30 years ago and is now an active spokesperson for recovery.
An interesting article today comparing the response to AIDS and COID-19:
https://wildhunt.org/2020/03/column-two-pandemics-and-why-their-differences-matter.html