Giving Voice 30th Anniversary Quilt

Dear Giving Voice Festival Friends - performers, scholars, teachers, directors and participants, whether you came as an individual or as part of an ensemble:

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Giving Voice, the international festival of the voice in performance curated by the Centre for Performance Research. We had hoped to mark this milestone by holding a special edition of Giving Voice as well as producing a publication. However, the combination of the ‘Brexit effect’ on planning and funding last year, followed by the Covid 19 crisis, made such an event initially doubtful, then impossible.

Yet perhaps you can help us to achieve a different but beautiful event!

We are asking everyone we have invited over those thirty years to help us celebrate this anniversary, despite the current restrictions: we would love any of the more than 200 invited artists or anyone who participated in workshops or came to performances or other presentations to get in touch and send a personal response to the project.

What we would like you to do is to send a video or an audio file that we can weave into a digital Giving Voice Quilt. Your contribution could be a song or speech, a poem, some thoughts about voice or a voice exercise that is, ideally, no more than three minutes long. We would also like you to share a memory of your time at Giving Voice , but in a separate file: What do you recall as significant; did you learn something new or hear voices you were not previously aware of; did you meet another artist with whom you then collaborated or corresponded; did what you experienced influence your subsequent work? The file should be clearly titled with your name and the subject (i.e. Name/Song/Speech/Talk or Memory, or whatever is appropriate) and emailed to the following address:

GivingVoiceQuilt@thecpr.org.uk

The material will eventually be woven into the Giving Voice Quilt and posted on our website, and more widely, for the delight of all those who love the voice. We hope to construct it so that the viewer can access individual items, but so that it is also representative of the huge variety of vocal contributions made to the festival, as well as the truly international nature of the project. We feel this would be a fitting celebration for Giving Voice 30 and a reminder of the Centre for Performance Research’s enduring curiosity and passion for understanding the relationship between tradition and innovation in performance over many decades.

If you are in touch with anyone else you know has been a contributor to Giving Voice , we would be very grateful if you would pass this message on, to ensure they are aware of this request. Sadly, some Giving Voice guests are no longer with us, but we hope to extract footage from the archives so they can be present, nevertheless.

We will keep the opportunity to contribute open for the next three months to allow the request to circulate: so from June 19th to September 30th 2020. If you want to ask about this or clarify anything then just email me, Joan Mills, directly: voicemills@gmail.com or Helen Gethin: h.gethin@thecpr.org.uk - We will get back to you as soon as we can. If you send us a contribution, we will assume that you are happy for this to be shared publicly, but the copyright will remain with you.

To help you recall the time/s you were at the Festival, see the list below for the project editions to date and their theme or ‘frame’:

We look forward to hearing from you.

With best wishes from Aberystwyth

Joan Mills
Director – Giving Voice

Giving Voice posters

 

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call for contributions
Submitted by admin on 22 June 2020.