In

Wednesday, February 19, 2025 from 7:30-9:00 PM

“Listen Like Lovers: Pedagogy of the Surveilled” is Music Research Strategies‘ vagabond, audience-participant and active listening conduction system and shared intellectual property, graphic score developed with an Insurgent Learning Ensemble for the 2024 Sonic Acts Biennial (Amsterdam,The Netherlands). Ensemble members responded to an “open call” focusing on personal histories of navigating migration management policies and practices in everyday life as a way to resist surveillance by Levantine and North African participants in an experimental, critical improvised music performance-constellation and context.

The photographic images that comprise the graphic score were made with fire, metal and wood during a tactical media-making Insurgent Learning Workshop (ILW) by respondents using Underground Railroad (UGRR), hosted by 2024 Sonic Acts Biennale curator Maud Seuntjens and co-developed with Ghenwa noiré of SALWA Foundation.. The metal used are branding irons from Music Research Strategies’ collection of UGRR quilt code-inspired ILW elements. Corresponding to the image-array, or the ILW-generated, interculturally-situated new codes, are the subject of the conceptual and Improvised performance of narrative of the “Pedagogy of the Surveilled.”

Offering an array of 14, 2’X2′, double-sided, graphic scorecards that make up the of “Listen Like Lovers: Pedagogy of the Surveilled” and three active listening directives. Active Listening directives are in place throughout the performance-curriculum to transmit performance-worker instructions for both the Insurgent Learning conduction and performing ensembles to a) perform their individual dynamics or disciplined practice, with scorecard or instrument (vertical, y-axis); b) perform while looking and listening collectively (horizontal, x-axis); and, c) perform your discipline within the full, voluminous, three-dimensionality of the performance container (z-axis).

On February 19, Music Research Strategies’ continues the quest to generate new narratives of critical discourse and Improvisational cultural weaponry to “Listen Like Lovers,” “Listen Like Lawyers,” and “Listen Like Wolves” in the Pedagogy of the Surveilled, with the support of the Extemporaneous Music and Arts Society (EMAS), and Charlotte Street.

The “Listen Like Lovers: Pedagogy of the Surveilled” program invites audiences to participate as conductors to form the “Insurgent Learning Conductor Ensemble – KCMO” in two iterations. First, audience-conductors will perform the debut conduction for Music Research Strategies’ solo percussion, performance-composition practicum of the “Pedagogy of the Surveilled,” with a static set of original “sound-events” (referencing Wadada Leo Smith’s nomenclature) corresponding to each scorecard image for an unpredictable and ever-changing narrative determined by an ever-changing, active listening prowess of Insurgent Learning Conductor Ensembles as the work tours indefinitely.

After a brief intermission, the, now tempered, Insurgent Learning Conductor Ensemble – KCMO will perform the conduction for a second time, but to an Insurgent Learning Ensemble – KCMO curated by members of EMAS, joined by Music Research Strategies.

Self-styled Music Research Strategies is, simultaneously, the Creative Music percussionist Marshall Trammell cultural work persona and community engagement platform. ILWs are an ongoing interculturally-situated, Performing Political Education platform designed to amplify the voices, experiences and celebrations of oppressed and discontented communities through Critical Improvised Music technologies, praxeologies (complexity theory and project management), field and case studies in Research Justice, Participatory and Collaborative Research and collective reimaginings of the tactical media from Underground Railroad-era for today’s political landscape.

Performances are led by self-styled Music Research Strategist and percussionist Marshall Trammell communal archival practice where participants sharpen their ‘cultural weaponry’ by expanding the breadth and depth of their beloved culture and heritage, supporting the intercultural life in their host countries and sharing their expertise garnered through their own stories as a form of collective research on immigration in relation to technological developments and the current political atmosphere.

Event Details
When

Wednesday, February 19, 2025 from 7:30-9:00 PM

Where

Charlotte Street Stern Theater (3333 Wyoming St)

ABOUT EMAS PRESENTS

EMAS Presents is an experimental and improvised music series curated by Seth Andrew Davis + Evan Verploegh. An extension of the collective Extemporaneous Music & Arts Society, EMAS Presents highlights local, national, and international music practitioners to grow Kansas City’s improvised music community.

Next Event

What Came With Spring: Documentary Screening

When

Wednesday, March 26 at 7:30 PM

Where
Charlotte Street Stern Theater (3333 Wyoming St)
Recommended Posts