Musician Dario Villegas Bernal was introduced to tune our ears and bodies and voices to the attending to and making of musical sound in the outside environment and inside our institute space.
Dario guided us in making musical sounds with our bodies and voices as instruments, conducting us to be loud and soft, fast and slow, on and off, first giving groups sounds and conducting their playing, and then letting groups propose their own sounds.
We then broke into two rooms; two groups in each room, forming an inside and outside circle, with each concentric circle alternating between being the audiences to and the performers for the other circle, concentrating on creating repeated sounds that grew out of the sounds emerging from the group as individuals were tapped by Dario and Kurt to start shifting the repeated sounds. The group reflected on the experience and described the different visual images that their sound symphonies evoked in their minds’ eyes. This exercise develops a sensory-based construction of community identity. The Sound Symphony is collaborative enough that it encourages active involvement of shyer students while pacifying students who typically feel compelled to over-perform. This exercise may also serve as a powerful Entering Text activity that prepares readers to respond to text as a source of sound and visual imagery in order to generate a full-bodied comprehension experience.
I was a wretched history student. History classes were like visits to the waxworks or the Region of the Dead. The past was lifeless, hollow, dumb. They taught us about the past so that we should resign ourselves with drained consciences to the present: not to make history, which was already made, but to accept it. Poor History had stopped breathing: betrayed in academic texts, lied about in classrooms, drowned in dates, they had imprisoned her in museums and buried her, with floral wreaths, beneath statuary bronze and monumental marble.
Perhaps Memory of Fire can help give her back breath, liberty, and the word.
– Preface from The Memory of Fire Trilogy by Eduardo Galeano
We shuffled into six new working groups by counting off 1-6, with each working group given a different origin myth as written up in Eduardo Galeano’s amazing Latin American history trilogy “The Memory of Fire.” The text given to each group was read aloud sentence by sentence, first in English and then in Spanish, again reinforcing reading as a social act as we attended to the sounds. Then as a group we chose one or two words we liked the sound of from the text given to our working group, and selected a “spokesperson” for our group to share with the whole institute community, along an explanation of why we like the sound of that word. These words were repeated by the entire group.
Throughout the process, we encountered diverse pathways for entering text, sometimes by building up from small encounters with parts of text, sometimes by reducing blocks of texts into essential elements to which we felt connected in different ways, sometimes by translating text into a different medium, and sometimes engaging a medium before we encountered a text.
Different phonemic elements invite different musical expressions. For instance, vowels can be used as sustained sounds, either high- or low-pitched. Consonants can be used as short sounds (‘t’) or as sustained non-pitched sounds (‘s’). Words can be used as rhythms. Syllables can be used as a beat.
We were directed to use the space, objects in our classroom, and our bodies as sources of sound. Some key ideas for musicalizing words including repetition, “sculpting” the sound qualities of the words (such as muffled, pinched, growled, etc.), and recognizing the Importance of silence.
Each working group chose Spanish or English or a mix of both to share their Galeano origin myth with the entire group, with one person reading and their working group creating the sounds behind the reading. This approach engages an entire class in an active close reading of texts that everyone can participate in at a high level.
Moving back and forth between “accretion” (adding in additional elements) and essentialization (subtracting inessential elements), we reduced our text elements to 1-3 words, experimenting with how the sounds and words best resonated with each other, and then performed collectively for the entire group, with Eduardo Galeano’s introduction to the text read by Marimar. This introduction describes how the world becomes alive for us through multiple artful readings and retellings of narrative – exactly what we are striving for through this institute itself – for ourselves and for our students.
We began the afternoon by using the “Zoom In” Thinking Routine – which was designed for looking at visual artworks, but can also be applied for developing an expanding understanding of text, and for seeing how details contribute to and jostle against each other in forming the gestalt of an expressive work.
We started with a fragment of a complex text, read it, and considered what it made us wonder.
We then “zoomed out” to read a little more of the text, and considered how this additional content changed our understandings.
Zoom In: A Thinking Routine
Zoom in: una rutina de pensamiento
Living on borders and in margins
Vivir en las fronteras y en los márgenes
– Excerpt from Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa
Finally, we looked at the full text that these fragments were part of, circled a new sentence that added new wonderings to our thoughts, and attended to how our thinking shifted as we moved out from our original zoomed-in reading.
Zoom In: A Thinking Routine
Zoom in: una rutina de pensamiento
Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one’s shifting and multiple identity and integrity
Vivir en las fronteras y los márgenes, mantener intactas las múltiples identidades e integridades cambiantes de uno
– Excerpt from Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa
We next used the charming devise of Story Cubes (dice covered with resonant images rather than numbers) to propel us into richer storytelling. First we worked in groups, with each member using an image from a cube to build a single collective story, using a “yes, and” storytelling philosophy (validating and building upon each contributor’s improvised addition to the story).
Next, we made lists of possible origin stories we could tell about ourselves. Here are some examples:
We then wrote lists of possible stories we could tell using the prompt “How I became..”
We shared one of our stories from our lists that we chose to present to a series of partners, and then wrote that story out with a beginning, middle, and end for reading to our colleagues at our tables. These proved to be delightful and touching, and the step by step movement into this writing and reading, shifting between solo work, pair work, and group work, made everyone feel safe and capable.