Talking about Timor Leste

I have a presentation coming up soon, as part of the Arts Education 2011 Colloquium series at the University of Melbourne. If you are in Melbourne, please come along:

Date:         Monday, 1^st August, 2011
Time:         5.15 – 6.45 pm
Venue:      Frank Tate Room, Level 9, 100 Leicester Street, Carlton

Toka Boot [Big Jam]: Four months making music in East Timor

From October 2010 until the end of January 2011, musician Gillian Howell undertook an Asialink artist residency in East Timor [Timor Leste]. This presentation describes – through words, pictures and video– the fruits of that residency, and some of the challenges that arose. From a concert for Human Rights Day in Baucau, to informal jams with children on the veranda of her house, to workshops in kindergartens, language classes, and remote mountain villages, Gillian’s experiences revealed much about what it can be to be a musician within a community.

Gillian’s experiences also reveal the complexity of being an outsider in Timorese society. She considers this with reference to Timor Leste’s legacies of centuries of European colonialism, brutal years of occupation, times of conflict and times of fragile peace and UN Administration, and how this history has influenced Timorese interactions with malae [foreigners].

This was not a research project, but a documented music residency in a remote community. Gillian reflects on her experiences as a practitioner working in this somewhat isolated environment, with descriptions drawn from her online journal (http://musicwork.wordpress.com), illustrated by films and photographs taken during the residency.

Presentation – integrating Timorese music into workshops

Last Friday night I gave a short talk and video presentation to the Melbourne East Timorese Activity Centre in Richmond, inner-city Melbourne. This is a group of Timorese and Australian activists and Timor supporters who meet at the start of each month to hear about various initiatives and developments taking place in Timor, to eat together, and keep in touch.

As you can imagine, it is a lovely group to present to. There is a wealth of experience and knowledge in the room, and also an appreciation for all the work and initiatives that are taking place in East Timor. I decided to focus my presentation on the ways that I’d integrated the aspects of Timorese traditional music that I’d learned about during my residency – songs, instruments, stories – into some of the workshop work I was doing there. I created three new videos for this presentation, showing the gradual transition from a song or story being learned, to being integrated and then shared more widely.

I got some very warm and appreciative feedback after my presentation. Several of the Timorese people talked about how important it is that the traditional culture is maintained. However, they said, “We don’t really know how to use it in workshops like this. It’s an important way that outside visitors like Gillian and Tony can contribute and assist us. There are lots of music people in Timor, but they don’t have these skills of working with children and large groups of people.”

Here are two of the new videos I presented that night. The first one shows the integration of a traditional song into workshops – from the first time I learned it sitting on the back of a truck:

The second one shows a Musical Story-telling project I led in Lospalos, about the nearby Lake Ira-Lalaru:

The only time I visited Lake Ira-Lalaru (which is enormous), it was flooded, and the causeway that you travel across by car proved impassable. Here are a couple of photos from that day, taken through the car window:

 

New videos – songwriting about human rights

I’ve just finished editing two more videos from my East Timor residency, October 2010 – January 2011. These videos show footage from The Right To Play, a music and songwriting project I led in partnership with Afalyca Arts Centre in Baucau. The project was my first in Timor, and the musical outcomes were truly memorable. The songs were generated through discussions about human rights and children’s rights. The children played local instruments made from bamboo, drums, guitars, and chime bars brought from Australia.

You can read the descriptions I wrote at the time about the project’s creative process here (Day 1), here (Day 2), here (Day 3) and here (Day 4). Otherwise, please have a look at these two videos. The Right To Play, part 1 shows some of the work in progress towards the creation of the first song, Moris [Birth].

The Right To Play, part 2, is a collection of photographs from across the four days of workshops, backed by our second song, Education, where the children sing about all the things that an education offers a child.

 

 

Video of the Toka Bo’ot event, East Timor

I’ve just uploaded another video from my East TImor residency. You can view it here:

This one was a true labour of love to edit – you’ll have to forgive a few odd transitions, and please admire all the segues that line up the musical phrases without skipping a beat, as I was working with very fragmented raw footage for this project!

Forever Young in Fataluku

Here is another video from my four months in East Timor. One of the enduring songs during my time in Lospalos was the pop song Forever Young. Initially I decided to translate the song in the local Fataluku language (with the help of local people of course) as a gift for the teenage girl who cooked all my meals for me, because she liked the song so much and wanted to know what the words meant. Later, the song took hold with the group of young people who used to gather on the veranda each afternoon for a jam session.

I created a simple accompaniment on the chime bars for the song, and a teenage boy volunteered to be our Chief Guitarist. We ended up performing our version of this song live on local radio one evening.

This video shows the progression towards that performance:

More songwriting in East Timor

I’ve just finished editing another video from my East Timor residency. This one shows clips from the songwriting workshop I led at the local English language classes in Lospalos. About 40 students took part, and elected to write a love song.

Songwriting can be a very engaging and interesting way to encourage people to use the English that they know. They discover that they know more words than they expect, and they also learn new words very quickly, because they use them in context straight away, and attach them to music (which helps embed them in the memory).

I loved the sentiment of this song. Favourite line?

I’m happy because I found another love.

We met at the market, buying some bananas.

Of course! What better place to chat up a new love interest than at the banana stall? You can read more about this project here – it’s the post I wrote at the time of doing the project.

Songwriting in Timor

My current evening task is to edit footage from my Timor residency, in order to present some of the ‘themes’ and projects that emerged while I was there. It’s wonderful to watch all this footage with the bit of distance I have now – I’ve been back 2 months this week. I feel like I am only just starting to digest my experiences, and to put them into succinct story form so that when people ask me, “So, how was Timor?” I have coherent things to say!

This video is from Baucau, and shows the initial songwriting workshop I did with the women’s centre there.

 

And this video from Lospalos shows some of our instrument-making activities. I love the energy and activity that this footage shows.

Mobakomeenofway

One song I have mentioned many times in my Timor blog posts is Mobakomeenofway. Some weeks ago a reader asked me for the words to this song, and I have added them in a reply to her comment; however, the words on their own have limited use if you don’t know the melody. I’ve been mulling over ways to share the melody with you too.

I learned this song years ago, when I was a student in London at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. I think Sean Gregory taught it to our group, and there was a little dance step that went with it. I have kept the dance step the same over all these years – I love it! It is easy to demonstrate and teach, and throws a few coordination challenges out there for the students, and it is kooky enough that no-one looks better than anyone else when they are doing it. A great leveller, in all sorts of ways.

I think Sean said it was Ghanaian. But I could be wrong. I recall that the words mean something like:

Leader: Will you come out and play? (O wene maka lay, mobako meenofway?)

Everyone: Yeah, yeah, we’ll come out and play (Yeah, yeah, mobako meenofway!)

You repeat these lines again (bars 2-9 in the score below), then everyone sings the chorus while doing the dance. The chorus is repeated twice.

Everyone: Mobako meeno fway, Mobako meeno fway,

Mobako meeno fway, Mobako meeno fway,

Aim for a nice swoop downwards on the slur in bars 12 and 16, it gives it a full-throated appeal. The dance requires you to stand side on, so that one foot is pointing toward the centre of the circle (I forgot to say that this is a song that works well in a circle, and that is how I always teach it) and the other foot on the outside of the circle. Your stance is only about hip width – or a little wider – apart, though. No gargantuan side-splits required. Stamp the inside foot, and clap your hands in that direction at the same time, on the word Mobako. Stamp the outside foot, and clap your hands in that direction at the same time (twisting at the waist), on the word meeno, then stamp/clap with the inside foot again on the word fway. You see? Not so hard, but takes a bit of a try-out for the first go.

Try the words out with the Noteflight score I’ve made, here. I’m supposed to be able to embed the score into this blog post but it’s not working so well. Here is a link to the score – let me know if it doesn’t work. I’ve just discovered Noteflight, late on this Sunday night. I think I need a bit more time with it to get properly acquainted.

 

Conference in Dili

Before leaving Timor, I presented at a conference on Working with communities through the Arts. This event was organised by Many Hands International (my host organisation) and presented to a packed room of representatives from different Government Ministries (Culture, Education, Tourism) and NGOs.

I was the final speaker for the day and gave a presentation about my work in both Baucau and Lospalos, comparing the two models of engagement that I used, and talked about community music in this context being particularly characterised by active participation (as opposed to passive consumption by an audience). As I spoke, a slideshow of photographs played behind me, on a loop. Tony told me later that there were several fortuitous moments in the slideshow where an image would be displayed that gave a visual example of exactly what I had just been describing in my talk! But in any case, the photographs were far more powerful than any words I spoke.

There were many Tetun speakers in the audience, so I worked with a translator. I would say a sentence, and he would translate it. Perhaps due to the nature of what I was talking about (and the fact that it is unfamiliar territory for many Timorese) the translations took at least twice the time that the original language required. It was an interesting presentation experience. You can read my presentation at the end of this post.

Q & A

After each of the speakers had presented, questions were invited from the audience. I was asked three questions by a Dili-based arts worker:

You’ve been involved in some great initiatives here, but now you are leaving. Do you have plans to come back?

I would love to come back! This has been an amazing time, and I’ve learned as much from being here as others have learned from me. So I’d love to come back, but I would need to be invited. In Australia I am a freelance artist and educator, and I work with many different organisations. I don’t have a salary; I get paid each time I work. This means that I have a lot of flexibility to build projects in Timor into my schedule, but I don’t have the means to take time away from work under my own steam.

Similarly, the invitation is important because I don’t want to be imposing anything on the Timorese. This is a rich musical and artistic culture, and it is up to the Timorese people to decide if they want further input from outside people. An invitation is an important indicator of that.

How sustainable has your work been? Will the children continue to play music now that you are gone?

I hope so. But I have to accept that as an outsider, and someone who is here only for a short time, it is not ultimately within my control. I hope that playing music with us each day might have inspired some of the children to seek out these opportunities again, and to recognise their talent and capacity for this kind of work. Maybe one will take the initiative to start his own group – we’ve suggested that to them! I hope that we have sufficiently modelled our strategies, processes and techniques for developing music-making among new groups and particularly with children, so that other Timorese musicians and teachers might be able to adapt some of what we have done for their own purposes.

But ultimately, the sustainability of what I have done in my residency here is dependent on the Timorese people. We have modelled ideas and processes, built instruments using local materials and knowledge, and put groups in contact with makers. I hope, I truly hope, that they will act on the momentum from our visit and keep these activities going somehow. But in the end, it is not something that we can take responsibility for.

What do you think are the tangible or measurable learning outcomes for the children in these projects?

Measurement in music learning is a very complex and much-debated thing. You can measure how many notes someone knows, or how quickly they can move their fingers – but this just tells you about one aspect of music-making. It doesn’t necessarily indicate the student’s command of musical understanding.

Our music-making projects were not focused on learning outcomes, they were focused on participation, inclusion, and the collaborative development of musical ideas. Naturally, learning and skills development is an outcome of this participation, but it’s not the primary focus. Therefore, we didn’t set up tools to measure participants’ learning progress.

However, I know that much was learned! If I think about the Lospalos project, then I can think of indicators in the children’s demeanour that suggested a growing sophistication in their understanding of music, of instruments and of collaborative group processes. For example, in the first few jams, the children were very chaotic. They would snatch at instruments, and grab them from each other. They would hit them very hard, almost as if to see what it would take to break them! Their concentration would waver just a minute or so into jamming on a rhythm or riff.

By the end though, I could see a great many changes. The children took tremendous pride in their ability to play rhythms and melodies on all the different instruments. They were still highly energetic, but they knew how to recognise and respond to music-making cues. They were far more rhythmically attuned to one another, noticing when music was starting to fall apart, and listening acutely while playing in order to bring it back to the groove. They learned from each other, watching as one person played, in order to learn in and memorise it prior to taking the instrument themselves.

These are all things that show an awareness and understanding of the musical principles that make ensembles sound coherent, and of the skills required for collaborative music-making. It also shows they were highly engaged and keen to learn.

Meanwhile, there were changes in the community around us. Among our neighbours, quite an array of instruments were starting to appear. People didn’t necessarily come to us to show them or share them, but they certainly played them, sometimes from dawn til dusk.

Therefore, I am sure there was lots of learning going on. You’d need especially designed tools to isolate particular aspects and measure their progress, and this wasn’t our role or interest. But the progress made in musical understanding was clearly visible and audible, when we compared the demeanour of the first participants, to their demeanour in our last sessions.

Click here to read a summary of my spoken presentation in Dili on Tuesday 25^th January.

The dilemma of donations

A dilemma that comes at the end of many projects in developing countries is what to do with the materials you have been using, or that have been donated, once your project ends. It’s a dilemma about realities and likely scenarios, about ownership and power, access and equity.

Years ago, when I worked with War Child in Bosnia-Hercegovina, all the kindergartens in East Mostar had just been refurbished. A donor gave every kindergarten a collection of instruments, the idea being that when the War Child musicians came in to lead workshops, each kindergarten would have instruments for the children to play. But when the workshops started some weeks later, almost all the instruments had gone. Where, no-one seemed able to say. Stolen? Perhaps… but when people are poor, and suffering, and have so little, it is also likely that donations like this can end up in people’s houses, available only to their children and no-one else. Perhaps this is under the guise of safe-keeping. Another common occurrence with donations in developing countries can be how quickly things get broken or damaged. Perhaps this is because equipment of the kind we are used to in wealthy privileged Western countries is completely unfamiliar to the people receiving these donations, and they don’t know how to use them with care or awareness of their potential fragility. Perhaps it’s because there is no suitable place to store things when they are not in use, so they get shunted and knocked about. It might also be that the quality of the donated goods was not robust enough for the local environment. Many things can happen, some of which are within people’s control, and some that are not. Bear in mind too, that the energy required to take on responsibility for something new, can be enormous, especially when you are functioning on just one meagre bowl of rice a day.

So therefore, it is tempting to leave them in the care of an organisation or institution that has the capacity to store them and protect them. I’ve seen this before too. It can mean instruments that were designed for children to play with, explore and experience get kept locked in a cupboard, with no-one considered special or important enough to use them. It can mean that the custodians see them as a money-making opportunity, charging exorbitant fees to those who wish to use them, whether for educational purposes or otherwise. (I had direct experience of this kind of entrepreneurism in Baucau).

Basically, I think there are no great solutions about who to leave your things with, and certainly no hard-and-fast rules you can use to find your ideal solution. Ideal solutions would be – a safe place where instruments can be stored, where other people can access them freely, but where someone is assuming a custodial role, ensuring expectations for care and responsibility are met by those borrowing the instruments. In that way, donated things become a local resource, and can be used by the people they were intended for.

In this project, we had made a number of instruments from recycled materials (bells from bottles and drums from buckets), from local materials (the kakalos, using Maun M’s design and guidance), and from donations (the chime bars). We weren’t planning to take any of these with us, and the question of where to leave things was one that generated much discussion between Tony, Kim and I.

Tony was the person who had made the kakalos, and he pointed out that they were in fact easy to make. Surely the most significant thing here was that we knew the maker! If the instruments got broken or lost (or burned for firewood, or any other such event), they were easy enough to make again, as they only required bamboo (locally available), a saw (easily borrowed or purchased) and a machete (the number one can-do item in most Timorese households). We could just distribute the ones we have out into the community, he suggested.

But, I countered, there is value in having a set. It creates the possibility of an ensemble. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, as a result of our time here, some of the local boys decided to continue playing, and created an ensemble? That would be much harder to do if the instruments got disbursed widely. Also, we know that new things in any household get shared by everyone, and the youngest children in the household are rarely in any position to lay claim to them, because of the way the family hierarchies work.

The kindergarten we had visited at Esperanca Lorosa’e had impressed all of us. The staff were clearly well-trained, motivated and incredibly professional. They wore uniforms to work, and led the classes as a team, all participating and encouraging. Their response to our music workshop had been one of excitement, tinged with disappointment that there wasn’t more opportunity to work with us again. They’d told Kim they were interested in using some of the instruments we’d demonstrated in that workshop in their classes – they hadn’t seen anything like my music workshops before and were excited. They’d loved the thunder-makers and the bottles in particular.

Therefore, we decided to give all the bottles, buckets and the four smallest kakalos to the kindergarten. I also gave them the sets of pastels I’d bought in Dili and some of my left-over drawing paper.

We decided to keep the chime bars together as a set of three complete sets. They were the hardest to find a home for, as it was easy to imagine how quickly the sets could get dismantled – individual bars could get lost, mallets misplaced or broken, bars divided up among a family so that everyone got one coloured bar each as a way of being fair, but without realising they’d be destroying the potency of the set by separating them…

In the end it was decided to ask the local education authority to store them, with the understanding that they were to be accessible by schools and groups in the area (including, I hope, visiting malae working with local children). Tony and I felt sad that we hadn’t been able to find a more community-based home for them. Would the Motolori children ever see them again? They loved playing them so much! And had developed such strong skills on them. We also remembered the way some of the teenage boys from the Plan International band recording program had dropped by the house one afternoon, and after watching the local youngsters playing the chime bars, been eager to play them and utilise them in their own songs.

Tony decided to give the kakalos to Maun M and his family. After all, he had been the inspiration for making them, he seemed to be the most engaged, music-minded adult we had met locally (the recorders Tony and given them were played constantly in that house, usually well past midnight), and his large family had been part of our jams from the very beginning.

I had some misgivings. We’d gathered, even from before the event of the burglary, that people seemed to distrust this family. And at the certificate presentation, I felt unsettled by the cockiness some of those boys seemed to be displaying to the others. When the other regular boys heard of the plan to house the kakalos with that household, they looked distinctly dismayed, even horrified.  Does everyone know who came into our house? I wondered to myself. Do they think that it was someone from this family Are we being gullible fools?

But we’d never know the answer to this. And in the end Tony had the right response.

“Just let the community sort it out. If we’ve made the wrong choice, then the community will put it right. We’re in no position to ever make a decision with all the facts to hand, because we’ll never know all the facts! And we can’t control what happens after we leave anyway.”

So that was how we dispersed all the musical materials. And despite my concerns about the fate of the kakalo collection and the opportunities the local boys might have to play them – or any other instruments – from now on, I couldn’t help but nurse some small hopes. Wouldn’t it be great, I mused to Tony and Kim, if, when we or Many Hands come back, there is a kakalo ensemble here in Motolori? Maybe they will organise themselves and continue to play. Maybe someone will take notice of them, and they’ll get to perform. Maybe in a year or two, the Lospalos kakalo players will be invited to Ramelau Festival, or the Dili Independence Day Cultural Festival!

That would be a great outcome indeed. We also gave Maun M’s name to the kindergarten teacher. “This is the man who can make more of these instruments”, we told her. Another wonderful outcome, therefore, might be about a change in status for this family and for Maun M in particular, recognised as cultural contributors, as the go-to guy for all bamboo instruments and musical ideas. This too, would be a great thing.

Legacies are hard to attribute or predict! In any case, this residency was more about cultural exchange and learning, than about me leaving some kind of legacy in Lospalos. But during the time that we were there, some things did seem to change. From the time that we started to play our instruments on the verandah, other wind instruments began to appear in the street – bits of pipe, a recorder, even an ancient old buffalo horn. These were heard everyday, at all times of the day. People also sang a lot. They do this anyway, but lots of the songs that we heard them singing were songs we’d taught or sung in our verandah sessions.

Also, children played games together in our garden who at the beginning, didn’t play together at all (such as the landlord’s children, who at the beginning always went back to their house as soon as the dirty, noisy, rough boys from over the road turned up to play). Maun M came with us to play live on Community Radio, after having a recorder for just a day, and his skills as an instrument-maker attracted the attention of all the ANAM students as well as us. (This may have resulted in resentment towards him from others in the street, which may be why he was fingered as the culprit in our burglary – this was one theory that was posited).

Who knows, all of these things may have happened anyway. Or they might be part of the natural cycle of life and activities that is always unfolding in Lospalos. But there we were, living amongst that community for one small part of that life. We instigated some new activities, and I do hope that those experiences and interactions with us have created some new senses of possibility and change for those we met and engaged with. I hope that all the people we worked with have been changed by the experience as much as we have.