Rachel’s Blog

I’ve been at the Substance office today in Manchester near the beginning of an exciting collaborative learning project, bringing together a variety of creative and cultural organisations in a partnership to share learning on leadership. Included in the core partnership are Substance, Greater Manchester Music Action Zone (GMMAZ), Music Leader North West, and Performing Arts Network and Development Agency (PANDA). My role within this project is to facilitate the online sharing, provided on a web-platform. I want to use this post to explore how I use technology, and its potential for freelance artists and arts organisations.

My experience of distance learning and online forums has been, most often, frustrating. People did not respond to each others’ posts, content was messy and badly presented/described, and in the case of distance learning, the obligatory contributions to online discussions were so forced as to hardly be worth writing. This is why I am really looking forward to getting started on the leadership Lab project, where I will be providing online facilitation. Just as a discussion is most often useful when effectively facilitated, so too online discussion needs to be guided, especially as online discussions will be at a slower pace, as new comments are added over days and weeks.

Blogging can be equally frustrating at times, especially when no one comments – how do I know anyone is reading it, or that it is worth writing? Blogging is definitely worth the effort as it is a wonderful method of documenting publicly any influences, ideas, learning, project development, anything, in a concrete, yet informal way. And as someone running a small business, it’s a cheap (free with WordPress) way of having a website which is more than just an online poster.

Twitter is another tool which I have found incredibly helpful, mainly because it has greatly improved my google rating (yes, I admit, in my vainer moments I occasionally Google myself). Twitter is also great for seeing content I may be interested in. I follow people I am likely to be interested in such as musicians, community arts organisations, my friends, people in my local area e.g. local hospital as I am interested in health issues, local journalists and some newspapers. Twitter etiquette means you can follow as many people as you like. The Twitter question is different from Facebook, which is more about status/state of mind etc, where as Twitter asks the question ‘What are you doing?’. This can be useful for businesses as it is less personal, you only have 140 characters, so a ‘tweet’ might be “at the Substance office in Manchester meeting the orgs involved in Leadership Lab with @timdavies”

All of these different technologies have required a fair investment of time to get set up – the blog being the most time-consuming, although quite straightforward, and Twitter being very easy indeed. They are definitely worth doing as once they have been set up, they are easy to update and show everyone what you are doing/thinking, which is where the conversations should start. Tim Davies has written a series of one-page guides to help people start up with these different web-tools.

This was a fabulous conference run by Do The Right Thing, way back in October. I love the fact that I can justify attending a conference for my professional development that teaches how to make aromatherapy bath salts

Seriously, what really attracted me to the conference was the number of music workshops that were taking place. Unfortunately I could only get to 2 of them, but it is so encouraging to see the growth of music as a tool being used in social care and mental healthcare.

One fantastic organisation down in London is SoundMinds who use music as a method of community occupational therapy – they even have their own agency.

The highlight for me was Liz McNaughton‘s session Voicework for Wellbeing. Aside from voice and singing teaching, Liz also works with groups of people coping with degenerative diseases such as alzheimers and dementia, parkinsons and MS. She works completely unaccompanied, without percussion, and no songsheets (the simplicity of this appeals to me immensely) and she focuses entirely on the voice, whether singing or speaking.

I had a milestone day today as I conducted my first independent singing session with a small group of over-60s at an activity day organised by Age Concern Oxfordshire. The event took place in a Methodist church centre in Witney, which was hosting a range of different activities including a creche, a coffee bar, as well as the hall being used by Age Concern.

The purpose of the activity day was to provide information for older people about services they are entitled to or may need to access, as well as giving them taster sessions of different activities: seated exercise, singing, movement to music etc.

My session lasted about 30-40 minutes and covered a range of music, starting with a gentle warm-up, and moving onto some favourites from shows and musicals. The actions for Edelweiss caused a fair amount of confusion and hilarity, and engaged the participants with the song and with each other. It is so important to give the participants something to ‘do’ with the song, be it actions, singing the song in an exaggerated style or accents, or simply encouraging the participants to make a sound in a particular way, e.g soft and quiet, or precise, staccato etc.

I finished the session with a pared-down medley of African-American Spirituals: Oh When the Saints and Swing Low Sweet Chariot. This received a round of applause from other people in the room who were not participating.

A few learning points for me:

- remember to sing more quietly and listen to the sound the group is making

- think about the pitch – is it too high or too low for participants?

- how do I cater for people with particular needs? for example, there was a man there who was blind and so could not read the words, although I deliberately chose short songs, and could not see the actions

…more crawling really, but at least I’m not standing still or moving backwards. It’s difficult to know exactly what to focus on in these early stages of developing a practice. My time is currently spent playing my instruments (piano, violin, voice) and choosing new songs and polishing up old ones (at the moment Billy Joel’s ‘New York State of Mind’ to fit into a holiday-themed session), as well as the trips to the library (conveniently located near my ‘day job’) and online research which led me to Freddie Mercury on YouTube on my search for the audit commission’s report about older people staying active entitled ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ (more on that another time)… for now it is late and definitely time to go to the pub…