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CA CONGA COLAB PERFORMANCE

The final performance was, in my opinion, extremely successful. Everyone performed well and enjoyed themselves and we managed to get a good sized audience and a lot of participation.

CoLab YR1 - “La Conga CUBAN CARNIVAL” - DAY 4

Day four was spent cosolidating the repertoire and also figuring out the logistics of the performance (which took up a surprising amount of time). We figured out primarily who was doing what during which song. We concluded that we would have:

1. CONGA ORIENTAL, during which only a few musicians would play the songs (four horns, two singers and and one person per instrument/percussive part) and the rest of us doing the large group dance during which the three professional dancers would break off and do their more advanced dance. Also during this we would have call and response, where the horns would call and the singers would respond backed by those of us who were dancing.

2. CONGA PASEO during which we would break off into our own separate groups and do our individual conga routines.

3. MOZAMBIQUE during which we would all reunite in the studio room and all the musicians would play whilst the dancers danced to the music in front of the auidience who would watch, as opposed to the conga performances which were to be performed in the corridors and would involve us who were dancing grabbing members of the audience and getting them to join in.

AN INTERVIEW WITH BARAK SCHMOOL

It was great to work under the guidance of Barak Schmool. He is an enthusiastic, thorough and strict teacher. He has a great knowledge of rhythm and has developed very effective teaching methods, making sure that people truly understand the poly-rhythms involved and the relationships between each individual rhythm unit.

In this interview he talks about the lack a number of elements in the UK's standard music education practice and makes some extremely valid points.

LA CONGA DAY 3 CONTINUED...

During the second half of the day we were joined by one of Barak's colleagues who taught us different rhythms on congas, bombos, snare and cowbells for the mozambique whilst Barak was busy teaching the trumpeters their parts.

We built the mozambique rhythm from the bottom up, starting with the clave on the cowbell, then the bombos, then the congas and finally the snare, in the same way that Barak did for the other rhythms...

CoLab YR1 - “La Conga CUBAN CARNIVAL” - DAY 3

Day 3 was spent perfecting the repertoire that Barak had taught us the previous day, going over the songs repeatedly, making sure we understood the overall structure of each piece, including percussion breaks, solo breaks and transitions between tunes. It definitely wasn't a smooth ride and people were, I expect, tired from the previous couple of days of intense work. I was definitely feeling very tired by this point, but still extremely excited about the project, and the more the tunes came together, the better it felt.

On day three we put a lot of work into the mozambique, not only in music form but also as a dance with Luanda. Luanda gave us a brief talk on the history of the music, explaining that the mozambique was an extremely popular music and dance tradition in Cuba before the salsa and cha cha cha, that are perhaps more widely known across the western world. She also explained how the Mozambique is traditionally performed as a couples dance, where the two dance partners either copy or complemet each other with their movements, and the idea is to have an element of improvisation, where partners have to keep looking at each other in order to guess what the other is going to do next (of course the moves are picked from a pool of preset movements that go with this rhythm). She also split us into pairs and made us try this, as well as teaching us a group dance that we could walk with during the procession for the final performance.

Below I have inclused links to three videos I found on YouTube showing couples dancing the Mozambique, footage from a mozambique rhythm lesson with Pello El Afrokan, who is known as the inventor of this particular rhythm, and finally a live performance of a mozambique song by the great Afro-Cuban All Stars, a group that I have been listening to for the past 3 or 4 years now...

One thing to be noted is the fact that Barak would always get people to sing the rhythms before playing them, as is traditional in Cuban music education. We can see a short example of that in the video with Pello El Afrokan, where you can hear him sing the rhythm he is demonstrating.

Luanda taught us three moves for the mozambique and then she put us in pair and asked us to mirror each other, and to be playful with it. She explained that traditionally when dancing the mozambique two people will face each other and either one of them can change moves whenever they want and their partner has to follow. This is partly a seductive way of dancing, and the idea is that the two people do not take their eyes off each other in order to always watch out for when one will change to a different move so that they can follow them, but really its all about keeping eye contact and flirting, essentially. This is not to say that the dance is purely about courting and seduction, but there is an element of it that adds spice to it !

Day 3 was also, sadly, the last day we had with Luanda. We therefore spent a good two hours perfecting the routines for both the slower conga rhythms and for the faster conga oriental. We decided that the slower conga would be used for the small groups dance and the conga oriental for the big group performance and started thinking a bit about the actual logistics of the performance.

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working on one of the tunes.....

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my attempts at getting the bass down for ADIOS ESPARAGUERRA

A short interview with Luanda. She preferred to speak Spanish and I was happy for it to be so, I also felt it would be nicer for her to answer questions about her roots and her history in her native tongue (I will try to find time to write some subtitles to put on the YouTube video). I asked about how she got into dance in the first place, and she explained to me that she was born into a family of dancers, as both her parents were extremely accomplished dancers in Cuba, so naturally she began dancing at a very young age and also she became exposed to the professional world of dancing when she was just a child. By the time she was in her late teens she was already an accomplished dancer herself. She explains that she was travelling the world as a professional dancer from a young age and she eventually settled in France as that is where she fell in love and met the father of her first child.

I also asked about what teaching means to her, and I asked her questions on whether she feels that traditional dance is dying out in contemporary Cuban culture. She says yes, and she also explained that this is one of the reasons why she loves teaching the tradition, as so for it not to be lost.

When Luana talks I can feel her passion, her happiness and her warmth as a person. She is a great teacher, she managed to get even the most reluctant ones involved and always with a smile. Always reminding people to feel joy, and at the same time she would be thorough in her teachings and she would relate all the moves and dancing she was teaching us to the history and the tradition of Cuban carnival.

It was a pleasure working with her!

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an example of Barak teaching us....

CoLab YR1 - “La Conga CUBAN CARNIVAL” - DAY 2 music

The second part of our second colab day was dedicated to learning a small repertoire of tunes. Musicians and dancers were all involved, everyone had an instrument, in exactly the same way that we had done during our first day. Barak (pictured above on the left) made sure that everyone understood their part well. This really helped to make the group feel united and the music start to take shape.

I played a bass drum, then conga, then the cowbell, and finally I was asked to play bass for one tune.

We also did more call and response, and Barak wrote parts for some of the horn players in the group (trumpets, sax, trombone).

We worked with three main rhythms - the conga paseo, which was the slower version of the conga that went with the song we had learnt on the first day - Tumbando Caña, then the conga oriental (a faster version with very short call and responses - not even songs really, just two sentence chants), and then the mozambique rhythm, for which we learnt another song - Adios Esparaguerra. We also started learning more songs - Los Dandys, Mozambique Hey! and China Baila Mozambique.

Barak asked me to play the tuba part on bass

CoLab YR1 - “La Conga CUBAN CARNIVAL” - DAY 2 dance

Second day of CoLab started with an INTENSE two hours with Luanda, who helped us develop a full routine based on the moves we had looked at the previous day. We spent two hours perfecting the routine. We developed one long routine to be performed by everyone in the group, and added variation when she asked us to split ourselves into small groups of 4 or 5 and develop our own versions of the routine. She also took the 3 professional dancers among the group aside and taught them a more complex routine which they could perform alone whilst the rest of the group continues clapping and playing and singing to spur them on, in exactly the same way that this would happen during the traditional procession at Cuban Carnival.

It was really beautiful how Luanda encouraged musicians and dancers alike to really get involved. She kept teasing everyone into laughing and really enjoying themselves as we learnt the moves, and at the same time she was careful to make sure we all kept our level of focus high and really understood the moves. She paid close attention to the feet, and she equally demanding on the musicians as she was on the dancers. It was great to see how she managed to get everyone dancing, even people who clearly felt uncomfortable with it at the beginning.

Below are a few short clips, one demonstrating the full routine with the whole group, one of my individual group routine and one of Luanda teaching the dancers the more advanced moves:

#LuandaPau teachings

CoLab YR1 - “La Conga CUBAN CARNIVAL” - DAY 1

First day of CoLab was great. It was highly practical, engaging and structured to produce some tangible outcomes. This was to be expected, seen as the leader of the project, Barak Schmool, has a very systematic approach to teaching. I have been taught by him before in other settings, and that was part of my motivation to join this project, knowing that I would come out the other side having a lot to show for it, and having learnt new, interesting, valuable notions.

Barak spoke a bit about the general idea of carnival in Cuba, and then we started the day by learning our first tune, Tumbando Caña, a traditional carnival song which appears to have its roots in Yoruba mythology and is also very much tied in with the history of slavery in Cuba, “tumbando caña” referring to the act of cutting sugar cane in the plantations. I have started doing some research to try to understand the real meaning behind the lyrics, besides the literal one. Here are links to two blogs I found particularly interesting:

http://efectoblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/el-alacran-tumbando-cana.html

http://www.afrocubaweb.com/Alacran.htm

I have also found a good version of the tune online:

The group was shown how to play the tune with just percussion at first (later we incorporated horns), and both musicians and dancers were equally involved in the music making process. This was also a way of reflecting the fact that the main purpose of the carnival in Cuba is for people to come together, whether professional musician or dancer, or just a member of the public, everyone is involved in the procession. Everyone sings, dances and everyone can grab a percussive instrument and participate, therefore Barak asked musicians and dancers alike to grab a percussive instrument (cowbells, congas, snare drum etc), and learn a part, and learn to sing the tune simultaneously. Barak taught everyone the lyrics in Cuban Spanish and translated them for those who didnt understand, and then talked about the concept of call and response in traditional Afro-Cuban music as we started to internalise this by doing some simple call and response with him using the lyrics from the song.

One of the things that Barak emphasised was the fact that Cuban Carnival is mostly about the idea of coming together and celebrating. It is not meant to be a flawless performance for an audience to watch and absorb passively, but rather a communal experience, were the members of the public are just as involved as the professional musicians and dancers. However, especially because the public is mixed in with the professionals in one big street procession, it is important that the people “in charge” of playing the music during the street procession, especially percussion, have a solid understanding of the rhythms as so to keep the flow and continuity of the music and to provide an anchor for all involved. This is to say, it is meant to be a joyous performance where all are encourage to participate, however it is important to play the rhythms correctly, especially because of the amount of syncopation involved, the call and response, the different “calls” which mark different parts of the tune (for instance the bass drum phrase that marks the beginning of the tune, the phrase that calls in the chorus etc).

The second part of the day was lead by Luanda Pau, a former soloist dancer from the famous Ballet Folklorico Nacional de Cuba, now a world renowned teacher. It was wonderful to be in the presence of someone who not only had so much knowledge and experience and passion for teaching, but also who was born and raised in Cuba and therefore could speak from years of direct experience, and could transmit the essence of the culture so spontaneously and effectively. She started teaching us, musicians and dancers alike, simple routines and dance moves that can be performed whilst walking, as so to recreate the idea of a procession, where people dance as they move forward through the streets. Luanda has such a beautiful spirit, she managed to get even the most reluctant ones to give in to the music and dance with joy and focus.

Here are a couple snippets which show some of the moves Luanda taught us on the first day:

THE REAL DEAL

We finally made it! It’s not quite ready for the West End, but we’ll get there :)

PERFORMANCE DAY PREP!

We only had this day to really try out the performance with everyone. In the end, because of how difficult it had been to find dancers, find times to rehearse and get the project up and running, we opted out of a live classical string trio. Instead Rhianne just brought in a tape. Not as impressive, but it did the job!

The last touches

I asked my friend Owen to give me some tips on playing poly-rhythms, in case of a last minute change of heart which would mean I would end up playing percussion instead of bass...

#polyrhythmicbliss

THE FIFTH ELEMENT!!

Finally, the session before we were due to showcase our piece, RHYANNE STEPPED UP!!! It was great working with her, she was extremely collaborative and pro-active and fun! She worked on developing her character and the piece finally started coming to life!

#thefifthelementbooyah!

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