Filming African Music: an interdisciplinary study day

Saturday 18 November

Bath Spa University, Newton Park, Bath, BA2 9BN.

This interdisciplinary study day is a partnership between Bath Spa University, the African Musics Study Group UK branch (AMSG-UK), affiliated to the International Council for Traditional Music, the Afrika Eye Film Festival, Bristol (10-12 November 2017), and the British Forum for Ethnomusicology. The event brings together academics, performers, filmmakers and videographers to expose and critique the multiple challenges presented by video documentation of African music and dance. Considerations concerning the intersection between research and practice include contexts of performance in different cultural settings around the world, and the range of approaches to film, from indigenous and traditional settings to contemporary popular musical forms. 

Programme

10:00 Tea/coffee/registration

10:20 Welcome

10:30 Hans Hess: Orfeu Negro

11:00 Luis Gimenez: The role of music documentaries released by the International Library of African Music (ILAM) in southern Africa: subject or living matter?

11:30 Angela Impey and Andrew Botelle: Filming the Damara King’s Festival in west Namibia: cultural documentation and socio-political redress.

12:15 Lunch

1:15 Screening: They will have to kill us first, followed by Q&A with Andy Morgan and Simon Bright

3:15 Tea/coffee – MediaWall launch (Onyeka Igwe) and dance improvisation (Ripton Lindsay)

3:45 Jasper Chalcraft and Rose Satiko G. Hikiji: Filming as musicking: collaborations with African artists in São Paulo and beyond.

4:15 Luke Fowlie: Capturing conviviality: the filming of traditional music and dance among Cameroonian ‘Grassfields’ communities of Montreal.

4:45 Sara McGuinness and Simon Zagorski-Thomas: Creating an immersive music experience

5:15 Robbie Campbell: The sensory and the dimensional in ethnomusicology: a reflection on sensory ethnographic filmmaking, dyslexia, and Chopi timbila xylophone music in Mozambique

6pm Dinner

7pm Performance in the Michael Tippett Centre: Afrika Grooves and Moves

(Pete Bernard, Chartwell Dutiro, Ripton Lindsay, Sura Susso, Suntou Susso)