Social Impact Assessment: Music Research Strategies with John Brennan

Description:

Over the course of Marshall Trammell’s two-week residency at Western Front, he hosted three events connected to his ongoing Insurgent Learning Workshop series. Using ideas developed by the US Solidarity Economy Network as a framework, the workshops served as a public and collective process towards developing a new language through improvisation. Social Impact Assessment: Music Research Strategies with John Brennan, the third and final event in Trammell’s series, was an open rehearsal and workshop in collaboration with Afro Van Connect Society. 

Building upon the embodied experience of improvisation explored in Trammell’s previous workshops at Western Front, Social Impact Assessment was divided into three sections corresponding with the mind, body, and spirit. To establish a safe space for collaboration, Kor Kase of Afro Van Connect Society opened the event with a grounding activity that invited audience members to share words that represented the feelings they were bringing into the session. These words were later activated during a jam session led by musicians from Afro Van Connect Society.

After providing an overview of the history of the Underground Railroad and his artistic research on tactical media, Trammell was joined by Vancouver-based musicians John Brennan on drums, E. Kage on taiko, and Dae Shields on bass to collectively reimagine Underground Railroad quilt codes as scores. These patterns, which communicated secret instructions to help direct enslaved people to freedom, were analyzed as both visual culture and community-developed apparatuses for resistance. With facilitation support from Kase, Trammell invited eight volunteers from the audience to lead the musicians in a series of “conductions.” Evoking musical notation marked on sheet music, Trammell provided the volunteers with signs printed with different quilt codes. Introducing the symbols one-by-one, the group entered a co-learning process in which they became acquainted with contemporary interpretations of the quilt codes generated in previous iterations of Trammell’s workshops. Building on this cumulative research developed in different cities and institutional contexts, the musicians then translated each individual code into sound before connecting them into an improvised sonic narrative.

Curated by Pablo de Ocampo. 

Video documentation of this event is available upon request.