Greater Easterhouse Arts Company
The Bridge brings together the new John Wheatley College building, the refurbished Easterhouse swimming pool, the new Easterhouse library and Platform - a new arts facility housing the National Theatre of Scotland and local dance company Visual Statement.
In addition to running Platform, Greater Easterhouse Arts Company is responsible for delivering a range of arts outreach across the community. A key aim is to place arts and creativity at the heart of regeneration in Greater Easterhouse by creating and sustaining an exciting arts community that plays a major role in addressing issues of social inclusion, lifelong learning and economic development.
Greater Easterhouse Arts Company ran a project in October designed to stimulate a supportive environment for artistic exploration through music improvisation. In particular, emphasizing diversity, dialog, self-awareness, group awareness, listening, creative problem solving, spontaneity, and risk taking.
This Youth Music Initiative project held in October was a collaboration between 3 independent organisations: Platform, Arika, who create underground music and film festivals and Nameless Sound, one of the leading music education organisations in the USA.
| Nameless Sound (formerly Deep Listening Institute Houston) was established in 2000 to present the best of international contemporary music and to support the exploration of new methods in arts education. David Dove, Director of Nameless Sound, led the workshops that took place in Easterhouse in October. |
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Each year, Nameless Sound serves over 1000 young people in community outreach programs. The approach adopted by the organisation is based around improvisation, free expression and itspotential to encourage and develop personal emotional and spiritualgrowth and developed self awarenessin individuals across the community. This was a shared goal of the both Instal festival as well as Platform. This Youth Music Initiative funded project highlighted this shared ethos between the partnering organisations and was a learning experience for all involved.
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A series of community youth workshops in improvised music were led by David Dove, the director of Nameless Sound across Greater Easterhouse. 198 participants took part over a period of 9 days. These ran over a 2 week period in the lead up to Instal festival, involving a number of different youth groups and performances and culminating in a workshop at the Instal festival itself. The music workshops offered the potential for personal growth and community development through music improvisation. |
Participants, all from the Easterhouse and East End of Glasgow, were encouraged to participate from a range of musical backgrounds and traditions; as well as music that is from no tradition at all! Students of any skill level were encouraged to participate.Participants, all from the Easterhouse and East End of Glasgow, were encouraged to participate from a range of musical backgrounds and traditions; as well as music that is from no tradition at all! Students of any skill level were encouraged to participate.
The ability to read music was not a prerequisite. Visual artists, poets, actors, and practitioners of other artistic disciplines were encouraged to participate if they had an interest in performance.
For the second week of those workshops, David Dove, of Nameless Sound, was joined by 2 improvising musicians, called Nmperign: which is a Boston duo of soprano saxophonist Bhob Rainey and trumpeter Greg Kelley. Together they have released some of the most startling and celebrated improvised records of the last 5 years. Two of the most gifted and original improvisers of their generation, Bhob and Greg have worked extensively with David in the past, delivering workshops of this nature.
Inviting international artists to be part of this project was deemed a big success. Learning about the different approaches that David, Greg and Bhob took compared to Scottish based practice was inspiring. One of most notable being the amount of enthusiasm that they showed to the young people. This is one of the lasting legacies of the project.
In total 3 small, work in progress performances were held throughout the project, with a total of 73 people attending.
Innerzone
Ashcraig
Swimming Pool
Innerzone is a youth music project in the Greater Easterhouse Area, where some of the workshops took place. 17 young people attended and there was a performance at the end of the second workshop.
David has a very good understanding of working with young people in a short time scale and getting them to understand what it is that he is trying to achieve. 7 of the young people are members of a local rock band called Submerge who expressed initial feelings of confusion but everyone began to feel at ease and by the end of the first workshop, all of the participants had ‘opened up’ and felt relaxed about the music they were creating.Shane Connelly, a drummer that had worked with this group before on the EXNE music project was invited along to get an idea of how David worked and fitted in well with what David was trying to achieve.
25 attended this performance. Ashcraig is a service for young people and adults with a disability. The group of participants had never take part in anything similar to what David, Greg and Bhob were offering.It was agreed that after the second workshop a performance would take place for the rest of the school. David split the group into the bell choir, plastic pipe band and general percussion. The band worked extremely hard towards the performance and there was a great sense of togetherness both in the workshops and the final performance itself. After the performance, in gratitude, Ashcraig presented David, Greg and Bhob with Scottish scarf’s and mugs.
31 attended a spontaneous performance in the swimming pool at The Bridge. It was tremendously successful because the music that was being created was performed in such an unusual setting. The pipes and chutes in the pool fitted well with the instruments being played and the acoustics were great! The swimmers in the pool at the time were very accepting of what was going on and the leisure attendances were very accommodating. The simplicity of this ambient music in such a unique setting is something that we would like to try and take further in the future.
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The project has left a legacy within the Greater Easterhouse area due to local musicians and workshop leaders benefiting from the skills and experience of David Dove and his team. Positive results are seen in the international exchange of ideas and ways of working. |
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This transferral of skills and ideas is a key element of all Youth Music Initiative funded projects. As a result of the project practitioners in the Easterhouse area have thought about how they could bring these skills and ideas into future projects.
This transferral of skills and ideas is a key element of all Youth Music Initiative funded projects. As a result of the project practitioners in the Easterhouse area have thought about how they could bring these skills and ideas into future projects.
| Please visit Platform to find out more about the music programmes in Greater Easterhouse. The Youth Music Initiative supports other projects in the Informal Sector, please visit our Funding pages for more information. | |