Second Week

Our Second Week of workshops in the Srebrenica area focused on composing. Our aim was to help the children in each group to write a song or some music that we could integrate into the Beauty and the Beast performance in December. We also aim to share the songs among all the groups and we hope that the children from Potočari, Skelani and the kindergarten will be in the audience for the final performance in December. We think they will enjoy seeing the music they composed performed live, and they will be able to join in with songs they know.

In the kindergarten session, led by Toni, we helped the children write the words and melody to a song about the character Beauty. The children were very proud of this achievement and wanted to sing it many times. The session ended with some high energy dancing to some Scottish Celidh music played by Lewis and I. In Potočari we began work on two sets of lyrics describing hideous beasts! We encouraged the children to draw their own monsters, and were pleased to find that several children had brought along their own 'Kibungu' monster drawings for us to look at, following our session last week.

We chose a different approach to composition for the Skelani group, as these kids had shown such potential for creative work last week and we wanted to provide them with something which was adequately challenging. We decided to focus on creating an instrumental piece which we hope might form the basis of a larger scale work, possibly to be played at the end of the theatre performance. In order to give the kids an idea of how to create music for instruments that they may not be familiar with, we first introduced them to our viola, oboe and melodica. Following this we invited individual kids to 'conduct' us (both separately and together) while we improvised music which followed their hand movements (high/low pitch for one hand, quiet/loud for the other). After several exploratory attempts at this we then invited the whole group to suggest ways in which we could use this technique to create a short piece of music. The group proved, once again, to be very forthcoming and showed great enthusiasm for making musical decisions such as deciding the order in which each instrument would start playing and making suggestions as to what sort of mood they wanted to create. We added djembe (played by Toni) and recorded two short improvised pieces which followed the 'conducting' method. The kids were happy with our final attempt and we are excited about expanding on this music next time.

Unfortunately we were unable to work with the music section this week as only one boy turned up for the rehearsal. Again, this was disappointing, and we need to consult those involved in organising things in Srebrenica so that hopefully we can get things started as soon as possible.

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Earlier in the week, Lewis and I led two workshops in an elementary school in Dobrinja, on the outskirts of Sarajevo. We were accompanied by Nina and Stella, two women who are aiming to work regularly with kids from this school, on art projects. This programme is geared towards engaging kids (13-15 years old) who have previously avoided extra-curricular activities, in creative work. The two 45 min sessions were a lot of fun - we aimed to offer the kids a variety of different musical activities in this short amount of time (including singing, performing on percussion instruments and various musical games including a version of the conducting activity described above). We were very pleased with these session and felt that we really managed to break the ice and engage with the groups. Hopefully we can work with this group again over the next couple of months.