DOI: 10.18742/27246897
title: MUSLIVE Performance Workshop Two, 'Performance' (Sept-Oct, 2024): 2. Memento programme for the 31st October

description: This is the <strong>second </strong>item relating to the second MUSLIVE Performance Workshop, hosted in the Music Department at King’s College London, October 28-30th, 2024 (with a preparatory workshop day in August, 2024) and two public performances at Temple Church as part of the Temple Music Foundation programme on 31st October, 2024 (6.30 and 8.30).
This contains the 'memento' programme prepared for the performance at Temple Church on October 31st, 6.30 and 8.30 shows. The programme design was supported by a workshop with Dr. Katy Hamilton and the MUSLIVE team on September 19th. Different parts of the programme were prepared by Fiona Barsoum, Emma Dillon, Alice Hicklin, Betty Rosen and Geneviève Young. The extended programme narrative note compiled by Betty Rosen with input from the project team, drawing on MUSLIVE research by Emma Dillon, Alice Hicklin, Betty Rosen and Geneviève Young. Geneviève Young contributed to compiling images for the French materials; Betty Rosen for the Arabic poetry; Alice Hicklin for the Latin charters. The opening essays were compiled by Emma Dillon with input from Fiona Barsoum. The whole programme was compiled and organised by Emma Dillon with input from the MUSLIVE team. Justyna Ladosz undertook the design. Dr. Mohamed Ahmed's contributions were supported through his project, <em>Arabic Poetry in the Cairo Genizah</em> and copyrighted to that project.
Rationale and relationship to the performance and workshop
The programme was created as a take-away gift for the audience, offering them retrospectively the complete texts of all the items sung and recited and a more detailed narrative about the context for each item. The reason for holding back the full programme to the end of the performance was to encourage the audience to a different engagement with the performances (the theme of the workshop earlier in the week). A challenge in engaging with medieval repertories is their linguistic barrier for almost all audiences as well as for most performers (and indeed that was true also for many listeners in the past). Yet the impetus of performance is to forge connection between performers and listeners -- to communicate. Modern concert-going often includes a programme or supertitle, leading to an effort on some audience members to follow along, trying to make sense of the texts while also listening. One of the questions for the project -- and for workshop 2 -- was to consider how to offer audiences (and performers) a different experience, one aligning performer and listener more closely, in the act of performance. The workshop continued to support performers to deeper engagement with the texts and sources while also offering approaches to encourage singers to 'own' their songs in various ways, including through creation of grounded performances, some experimenting with singing from memory or from a small textual prompt. For audiences, the rationale was to offer narrative cues through the performance to help navigate the meaning of a song or recitation; and to provide a short 'taster menu' to follow the order of the programme and a few prompts to contextualise individual items. But by reserving the full programme to the end, the invitation was to listen and observe the performance more closely, attending also to how the performances stirred feelings and reactions, how those were present, too, in the performers.
The memento programme was thus created to introduce audiences to the research contexts for the performances, including more information about the team and presenters and process of creating songs; and to share more about the individual items in the programme, including the texts and translations.
Impact and dissemination
The programme was also a means to disseminate information and research relating to the project to the wider public. As such, it also served us as a tool to gather feedback from audience members. Emma Dillon and Justyna Ladosz designed an audience questionnaire, accessible through a QR code, inviting audience members to share thoughts with us subsequent to the performance.