Open Call: Big Bang Seminar 2023

Onassis Stegi organizes a music workshop with participants from Greece and abroad and invites musicians, composers, directors, dramaturgs, and educators to develop their skills and knowledge in a way that will contribute to their ability to create innovative music and music-theater performances for children.

The two-day event will include talks, discussions, and participatory workshops.

The main objectives of the Big Bang Seminar are to improve the quality of the non-commercial music landscape for children in Europe, to strengthen audience development strategies for children’s participation in music, and to inspire artists with skills and expertise that contribute to enhancing the music landscape for children.

Registration via the application form
Final selection based on application

The talks will be held in Greek and English without translation
The workshops will be held in Greek without translation

Monday, 29 May 2023

11:30-12:00 Arrival

12:00-14:00 Talk by Kaja Farszky: “Contemporary music environments for young audiences”

14:00-15:00 Break

15:00-16:30 Talk by Letizia Renzini

16:30-17:00 Break

17:00-20:00 “Sonic Dialogues” workshop by Thalia Ioannidou and Persefoni Miliou

Tuesday, 30 May 2023

11:30-12:00 Arrival

12:00-14:00 Talk by Kornilios Selamsis: “On the occasion of the Garden: Music and narration for young audiences”

14:00-15:00 Break

15:00-16:30 Talk by Hans Van Regenmortel “Babelut Parcours: Non-verbal sensory interaction between generations in an immersive artistic context”

16:30-17:00 Break

17:00-20:00 “What if words are not enough?” workshop by Evi Nakou

19:30-20:00 Closure

12:00-14:00
Talk: “Contemporary music environments for young audiences”
Kaja Farszky, Frédéric Verrières

Kaja Farszky and Frédéric Verrières give a talk about this year’s Nomad workshop created for the Big Bang Festival. The workshop was designed as a journey of unexpected sounds that encompassed rhythm, curiosity, melodies, and laughter. The aim was to engage with sound using the body, the voice, microphones, and electronic devices to make music together. As artists who create work for young and adult audiences, Farszky and Verrières use their experience from both worlds to interact with others. As opposed to underestimating children, they see them as the most difficult and direct audience, preparing environments for music making, especially for children with no musical background, and taking the risk of presenting non-obvious contemporary music choices to them.

15:00-16:30
Talk: Letizia Renzini

Letizia Renzini’s talk builds on the concept of multimedia and multidisciplinarity in musical theater and performing arts, seeking to survey the connections and hybridizations of live performance with contemporary art forms (performance, installation, technology).

Through various examples, the participants discuss the formal concepts of composition, remix, immersiveness, synesthesia, and sampling, with a look at the practices of collective creation.

Another focus is on revisiting classical repertoires and reinterpreting music material, both for young and adult audiences, and on exploring any differences in form and content.

17:00-20:00
Workshop: Sonic Dialogues
Thalia Ioannidou, Persefoni Miliou

The presentation/workshop “Sonic Dialogues” by Thalia Ioannidou, Persefoni Miliou concerns the creation of music performances for children, using everyday objects as sound sources and music instruments – something that we believe contributes significantly to children’s creativity and imagination and is also a means of communication with them. More specifically, we will focus on the expressiveness of sounds and the possibility of using them independently as an abstract language that finds its place in children’s worlds and helps us to communicate with them in alternative ways.

The workshop will introduce the foley technique, as it has been used in cinema, and through it we will explore the broader idea of using everyday objects as sound sources. We will look at examples of such practices, examine the characteristics of the sounds, and apply these to our workshop.

The workshop is addressed to musicians, composers, directors, and teachers who are involved or interested in creating music-theater performances or other projects for children audiences.

12:00-14:00
Talk: “On the occasion of the Garden: Music and narration for young audiences”
Kornilios Selamsis

Starting from the work “Garden or the Invisible Rope” that he created for the Big Bang Festival, composer Kornilios Selamsis will present the process of the piece’s construction and the context in which he worked, ending with the reception of the piece by the juvenile and adult audience. Using examples within the work, either recorded or written, he will attempt to open up the discussion around the function of a distinctive construction for an unsuspecting audience, around style, the function of time, stimuli, and aesthetics. The talk is aimed at composers, musicians, actors, and performers.

15:00 -16:30
Talk: “Babelut Parcours: Non-verbal sensory interaction between generations in an immersive artistic context”
Hans Van Regenmortel

“Babelut Parcours” by Hans Van Regenmortel creates a sensory, artistic, and participatory musical environment for babies, toddlers, preschoolers, and their (grand)parents. Non-verbal musical theater, mini-workshops, and sound installations flow together and invite everyone involved to interact. Besides an immersive artistic production around a central theme and aimed at this specifically mixed audience, the project acts as a laboratory to explore the possibilities of non-verbal, sensory interaction between generations. Hence its relevance to education. Indeed, the format shows how learning processes occur as a result of shared experiences between generations, rather than being the outcome of planned skills and knowledge transmission activities. The “vehicle” for all this to instigate, is the shared artistic experience of contemporary composed music, and the artists who actively interact with all participants in a way that reflects aspects of early mother-infant interaction. Built around a commissioned composition, “Babelut Parcours” allows each participant to find their own leads from the whole experience. A baby may be overwhelmed by the low timbres of the cello, perhaps a toddler is fascinated by the colors of the lighting and laughs at a funny sound. Siblings and (grand)parents may enjoy the composition itself performed by high level musicians. For everyone, all senses are on alert, and on each participant the performance has a different and evolving impact.

Τhe audience can recall and process the sensory input by playing with the musical material of the performance themselves. Many different modes of play appear: some children like to discover everything on their own, while others like to explore together with their parents or siblings, still others just like to observe.
The musicians and dancers play along nonverbally, giving musical impulses or trying to engage in musical interaction. Not by forcing anything on the children, but by joining in the spontaneous play. The whole approach flows from our extensive work in nurseries and after-school programs and leads to new perspectives in education. A non-verbal and a non-linear approach can flow on seamlessly in working with music school students as well. Experiential learning leads to new artistic perspectives.

17:00-20:00
Workshop: “What if words are not enough?”
Evi Nakou

Workshop on designing hybrid participatory performances with teenagers.

“What if words are not enough?” is a meeting in the form of a discussion and workshop, for the design of hybrid participatory performances with teenagers. Using cross-media poetry as a tool to create an accessible and empowering framework of self-narration for adolescents, musicians-educators will experiment with methodologies of interdisciplinary artistic expression, dramaturgy, and interpretation.

What if a story on Instagram, a video on TikTok, a voice memo on Whatsapp, a conversation on Snapchat lasts only for a moment? What if this time we asked teens not to keep their phone inside their bag?

In this meeting, we will experiment with open source and free audio, image, and animation editing software, with AI-based speech and image generation tools, and with the functions of social media applications, to devise processes of individual and collective narratives with adolescents. Utilizing sound, speech, music, photography, and video, we compose cross-media poems, observe their affinity with a story on Instagram or a video on TikTok, and reflect on their transience, medium, and footprint. Moving from the stage of expression to that of dramaturgy of a hybrid performance, we discuss methodologies and techniques of interpretation and participatory narrative composition. From the conception of the initial idea to the final rehearsals and performance, we devise a flexible framework of experimentation, play, and creation, open to co-design and contestation, according to the adolescents’ own subjectivity, desires, and concerns.

The workshop is addressed to musicians-educators with experience in informal or formal forms of artistic learning with teenagers.