Quetzal presents
Collective Songwriting Workshop
Sunday, May 15, 2022
12pm - 3pm
Collective Songwriting is a signature pedagogy of the Grammy Award winning Chican@ rock group Quetzal. This cultural convening methodology uses Convivencia as its principal driver. In doing this Quetzal center the “sociality of sound” making the gathering and process of creating music together more important than the outcome. A second principal aesthetic is Testimonio or “A voice that is oppositional and propositional, involves an urgent voice of resistance to social injustices, an urgency to speak out, a collective interlocutor, and a collaborative process of production and interpretation thus, expressing the central values of situated knowledge production, embodied theorizing, and community engagement.”
Collective Songwriting reorganizes our current relationship with music putting community members and their experience at the center of the creative process. All the while reinforcing the function of arts processes in social movement as not ornamental but ESSENTIAL. Each workshop is an exercise in communication, dialogue, agency and community building.
Though each session has a unique character and flow, the following are the sequential phases of the process:
· Testimonio (sharing/witness)
· Dialogue (interaction/relationship building)
· Imagining (participatory democracy)
· Collective knowledge production (Song)
Quetzal’s artistic vision is to help create more horizontal spaces where we can all be in community with art and the arts process as well as in art with community. Our goals are to foster dialogue, strengthen relationships and facilitate interconnectedness between generations and struggles while creating archives(songs) that can encourage lament, celebration and defense of one’s humanity.
Collective Songwriting method was born out of Chican@ Artivista praxis during the 1990’s in dialogue with Zapatista communities in Chiapas Mexico. Quetzal’s experience is that art and social justice are not mutually exclusive and in fact require a symbiotic relationship to thrive. They also contend that the arts process can incite the imagination in different ways and afford mobility towards radical creativity. Furthermore, we believe that engaging Community in the arts process requires providing artistic integrity and excellence.
Throughout Quetzal’s 23-year history they have been steadfast in composing thoughtful, intellectually rigorous and innovative music. They continue to be committed to the idea that our communities deserve well-crafted and produced music. This project will be impactful in that it rearranges the politics of participation and allows us to be in community with music composition and vice versa. Different from us composing stories about community, collective songwriting offers mobility deep into the work of democratizing process. It’s given us a way to facilitate a space where Community (including ourselves) does the work of music. The codes and social technologies that lie within composition can then be exercised repeatedly to the point of it being normal or “what we do”
TICKETS
Sliding scale $10 - $30