Chasing Windmills: The Music of Don Quixote
a performance and music workshop with Kurt Wootton and
Dario Bernal Villegas
a performance and music workshop with Kurt Wootton and
Dario Bernal Villegas
Dario and Kurt lead us through a series of physical and listening activities that focused our attention on sound and space and our interactions with each other.
We read the section from Chapter VIII on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza encountering the windmills, focusing on the expressivity of the words in individual sentence phrases.
Dario introduced us to ways of translating the musicality of text into vocalizations, and we became instruments in a sound symphony.
We divided into groups, giving each group a portion of text, using the sound of words to create soundscapes to go with each text portion, which we performed for each other.
a presentation by Eileen Landay
A Personal Story and Quixotic Question
Begun in the Teacher Education Program at Brown University in 1998 as the ArtsLiteracy Project a group of teachers and teaching artists, including Kurt Wootton, developed The Performance Cycle as the foundation for curriculum and professional development. That work subsequently led to The Habla Teacher Institute, established and directed by Kurt Wootton and Marimar Patron-Vazquez in Merida, Mexico. This year’s institute, its tenth, takes as its core text Cervantes Don Quixote. In the spirit of that text, and as a way of continuing to explore and further develop The Performance Cycle, focusing on the topic of “comprehension” I pose the question: “What Does it mean to Comprehend a text like Don Quixote?
The root definition of “comprehension” is prehendere which means “to seize or grasp.”
In the remainder of the talk, I wondered aloud about key ideas in Don Quixote, and ways to work in a variety of mediums to “grasp” those key ideas. To illustrate, I read aloud the opening section of William Egginton’s The Man Who Invented Fiction, brainstormed the particular qualities that print text lends to comprehension, and ended with a protocol for teachers when planning to teach by integrating the arts.
A writing and performance workshop with Patricia Sobral
The workshop participants were given arbitrary numbers to determine which table they sat at for this workshop, guiding them to meet and connect to a new set of colleagues. This dance of mixing and remixing the colleagues we collaborate with, the rich set of lenses employed for looking at the text, the range of media we explore, and the variety of spaces we work within is central to Habla’s scaffolding of deeply felt and considered encounters with literature.
Patricia asked us to look again at Don Quixote’s iconic encounter with the windmills, and to explore the ambiguity of this passage. What do we mean when we say that someone is “tilting at windmills”? Are they brave idealists? Are they foolish fantasists? The words and images can be interpreted in so many different ways.
She then asked us to write down the windmills that each of us tilts at, and we shared these with each other, exploring motivations core to our identities in an expansion of what we shared about ourselves through our kennings.
She then introduced the A-B dialogue – an interaction between two characters that has no clear meaning until it is interpreted by actors. We then broke up into pairs, and performed our wild, varied, and hilarious interpretations for each other.