AUTUMN 2024 NEWSLETTER
The CAIRH news
What news?
Meet Stéphanie Roy, our newest team member
Stéphanie Roy joined our team in October 2024, in the role of Development Officer.
As she says herself, we all live many lives within a single lifetime. Stéphanie began her studies in agriculture, before pivoting into dramaturgy and film. She worked twelve years in the film industry and was co-owner of the Utopia cinema in Montpellier, where she also worked as executive assistant. She graduated from La Fémis in 2019 with a degree in Film Production Management.
With over twenty years of experience in the nonprofit sector, including both volunteer and salaried positions in various predominantly artistic and cultural organizations, she notably co-founded the associations dynamOve and Bobine & Binette. She is also a member of the board of directors of the association La Saison Artistique de Mélando, where she is responsible for the budget. Before arriving in Malérargues, Stéphanie worked as a facilitator and coordinator at the community space La Filature du Mazel.
Her passion for developing artistic projects in rural areas led her to the Roy Hart Centre. The richness of the project is what captured Stéphanie’s interest and its development prospects in particular, as well as the collective adventure it entails.
Stéphanie can be reached at stephanie.roy@centrereoyhart.org
Welcome, Stéphanie!
What are we celebrating?
A jubilee homecoming
In June we celebrated the return of many of the first 49 members of the Roy Hart Theatre who moved to Malérargues fifty years ago. They were joined by sixty stagiaires attending workshops, masterclasses, presentations, and readings; forty choir members;
and the hundreds of people who attended nightly performances.
The week evolved in love, filled with moments of tenderness, joyful exuberance, and thoughtful reflection – in the theatre and studios and over shared meals beneath the mulberry trees, as well as amongst our extraordinary team of volunteers in the kitchens and the rafters. We sang, we danced, we laughed and cheered, and we shed our fair share of tears. It was a healing time and a redemptive experience of reconnections with old friends and an opening to the people of the surrounding locality who have supported the centre all these years.
A jubilant jubilee
The beauty of the place
in the June sunshine
refreshed
by the first stormThe golden stones
that filter
songs and cries
Reunions
discoveries
she whom I did not recognise
the one I met
he whom I did not recognise
the one who didn’t recognise anyone
those who are still standing
in spite of everything
Memories
reconstructed
contradictory
the smiles
the tears
and sighs
what has moved
abundance and generosity
from all sides
teachers and volunteers
meetings
passing the baton
creativity
champagne
empty glasses
full glasses
filled glasses
once again
this champagne
sparkles at the heart
Another wonderful Summer performance programme comes to a close
As the summer of 2024 comes to a close, we reflect on another wonderful artistic season. This year, we brought you a diverse and engaging programme, featuring two theatre productions, three concerts, and a poetic and musical performance. Many thanks for your enthusiastic attendance and generous feedback, which helped us identify two standout audience favorites: the powerful performance LOBA featuring Viviane Gay’s solo performance, and the fabulous concert Le Secret with Marion Rampal and Pierre-François Blanchard.
Many of you appreciated the outdoor refreshment area where audience members enjoyed the refreshments on offer and mingled with the performers both before and after the shows.
The ArtCom committee, responsible for artistic programming, currently comprises five dedicated volunteers who work throughout the year to bring you the best of local and international music and theatre. We look forward to seeing you next summer for another exciting season of artistic offerings!
The programme was made possible thanks to the generous support of the département du Gard.
To contact ArtCom please write to artcom@centreroyhart.org
Weaving Voices as Threads of Communities: An ERASMUS + Project
Over the past two years, five professors from the Roy Hart Centre – Saule Ryan, Carol Mendelsohn, Laurent Stéphan, Walli Höfinger, and Christiane Hommelsheim – participated in a project funded by the European Union called Weaving Voices as Threads of Communities.
The project involved the participation of seven partner organizations in six different countries: the Centre Artistique International Roy Hart, France; Colaborative Reichenow e.V., Germany; Leeds Beckett University – Performing Arts, United Kingdom; Sinum Theatre Laboratory Association, Hungary; Soharóza Nonprofit Association, Hungary; Solsidans Kulturförening – Studio Folkhemmet I Unnaryd, Sweden; and TuYo Foundation, Netherlands.
Each partner organization hosted the others for a period of seven days.The first phase of the work, which involved an exchange of practices among participants, gradually transitioned to engaging a very diverse audience, including passers-by on the street, choirs, migrants, and patients from a rehabilitation centre.
The hall of the Château de Malérargues was home to a summer-long exhibition showcasing the project’s scope and development.
Readers curious to learn more can request an e-copy of the book being created as the final phase of the project. As a European initiative with a view to reaching the widest possible audience, the book will be translated into French, English, German, Swedish, Dutch, and Hungarian.
The international partners shared their practices, methodologies, and specialized approaches, and created connections between various practices such as weaving and other manual activities, the physical and vocal approach of the Roy Hart Theatre, Georgian polyphonic singing, traditional Swedish Kulning, the Feldenkrais method, creative writing, and connecting with nature through Vision Quest.
The experience demonstrated that when people connect through these different practices — voice, weaving, movement, writing, and environmental work — they meet, see, and hear each other in new ways. When safer spaces are created, we overcome the barriers of language to establish trust.
Follow Weaving Voices on Facebook and Instagram
Photos: Olga Ganzha, Ivan Midderigh[/caption]
Latest news from the archives
Our project to preserve and digitize the archives of Wolfsohn, Hart, and the Roy Hart theatre for online access is in full swing!
Pamela Christiana di Almeda, who has been working with us remotely from Brazil until now, arrived in Malérargues this month to spend three intensive weeks on the project with Malérargues resident Rosa Lanati. Pamela is responsible for the indexation of the diverse archival material and therefore works closely with Rosa, who is responsible for scanning the innumerable paper documents, programs, letters and so on. They will be working together to ensure full integration and compliance of the Scanning and Indexation process. This is essential to ensure that the digital online platform for the archives and the physical system of archiving in Malérargues are both current and consistent.
In April we will have the assistance of an Erasmus+ student, Annarita Bitonto whose brief is to commence work on the enormously important audio archives. Paula and I will both spend several weeks in Malérargues to prepare for Annarita’s arrival and supervise her onboarding.
Our online fundraising campaign is still active and we encourage you to keep talking about it, Sometimes it takes a while to get our message out there but we see that there is still interest and we will need these funds to push on with the work through 2025. In addition we are, as much as we can, supporting Ivan Midderigh and Clément Caudal in completing the online version of Ivan’s upcoming Visual History from Wolfsohn to the present day. We consider this a priority and an essential addition to the archival content.
My best wishes to you as as we creep into what is a very rainy and cool Autumn here in Tuscany.
FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGN
As the end of the year is draws near we invite you to support our project to finance the preservation of our archives and the creation of a website dedicated to online research. Donors resident in France, Germany, Spain and Italy are eligible for tax deduction on their donations. For further details, please contact archecom@centreroyhart.org.
For further information and to make a donation please click here.
Many thanks in advance for your support!
To what are we listening?
Roy Hart – The book – Interview about the book written by Kevin Crawford & Bernadette Sweaney, by João Charepe
What are we reading?
Book review: “Hungry Listening” and Roy Hart
By Ralf Peters, Voice and Performance Artist, Philosopher, Listener and Active Member of the Roy Hart Voice Centre Association
In the framework of my research for the project “Vocal ecotism – vocal art in a wounded world”, I came across the book Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (University of Minneapolis Press, 2020) by Dylan Robinson, a xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah)* scholar, artist, artist, curator and writer.
The author describes the book as “a critical response to what has been called ‘the whiteness of sound studies”, in which he “evaluates how decolonial practices of listening emerge from increasing awareness of our listening positionality.”
Robinson compares the different approaches to music in Indigenous and Western thinking. He discusses how Western history has shaped our way of listening and the alternative ways of Indigenous traditions.
Much of what Robinson presents as forms of listening which are different from the “settlers’” ways, evokes our practices in listening to other voices in the Wolfsohn-Hart tradition.
Robinson claims that “hungry listening prioritizes the capture and certainty of information over the affective feel, timbre, touch, and texture of sound” (p.38). Listening without hunger is more about creating relationship through listening to each other, at all levels of our existence, much as we do in an individual voice lesson in the Wolfsohn-Hart tradtion.
Robinson explains that in Stó:lō/Skwah tradtion, it is important to listen with “three ears: two on the sides of our head and the one that is in our heart” (p. 51) In the Wolfsohn-Hart tradition we practice this form of listening which Robinson refers to as “a form of feeling the history from heart and ears together”.
Robinson describes an art installation at the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Canada. “Gathered Together” comprised a kitchen table and chairs, a tablecloth, a tea pot, and some cups, representing the importance of gathering in Indigenous traditions. It is understood not just as a gathering of individuals but also a “bringing together components of a history” (p.71). People at such a gathering did not listen to each other with hunger, but rather “when one person was speaking, the rest of the group listened respectfully (…). When the next person shared their thoughts with the group, they would respond in-depth, speaking not only to their own experiences and perspectives, but also to those they just heard.” They listened to each other retaining what they had heard and “incorporating it into how they perceived the topic at hand” (p.70). To many of us this may well recall the “River” format for company meetings held by the original Roy Hart Theatre.
He goes on to explain that in Indigenous traditions the senses are not strictly separated but understood as one system of relating to the world. This calls to mind Alfred Wolfsohn’s claim that for him, eyes and ears are one sense and that singing is a form of touching.
Why contemplate these (possible) parallels between listening in North American Indigenous cultures and our own approach, that is very much embedded in a European and Western tradition?
One reason is the transcultural quality of the work in the Wolfsohn-Hart tradition, which suggests that as practitioners of this work we have something to say in the dissolution of the dominating Western ideas of understanding the world to make space for other approaches more respectful to humanity and to the non-human world.
Robinson mentions more than once that we live in a moment of history in which we must acknowledge that we don´t know what listening really is. All of us – both Indigenous peoples and Westerners (“settlers”) – have lost this understanding. To understand what listening means to us today we cannot refer only to earlier traditions, but we must also find the courage to ask the question again. What does it mean to listen to myself, to others and to everything and every being in the world?
*Stó:lō refers to a group of First Nations peoples inhabiting the Fraser Valley and lower Fraser Canyon of British Columbia, Canada, part of the loose grouping of Coast Salish nations.
To read more about Ralf’s thoughts about hungry listening in the context of the research of “vocal ecotism – vocal art in a wounded world”, please see here.
An English translation of Ralf Peters’ book Paul Pörtner und Roy Hart: Die menschliche Stimme in Kunst und Leben about Roy Hart and Paul Pörtner and their collaboration in London from 1972 to 1974, is now availble. You can read about the book in our May 2024 newsletter.
You can also request a copy of the English translation of Ralf’s earlier book In Gedanken: singen.
Please contact Ralf at ralf-peters@stimmfeld.de for further details.
