British Council Vietnam is pleased to present SYMBIOSIS, a double bill of talks examining how various forms of film and music have been brought together within the context of cultural heritage, and to what ends.
Venue: Manzi – 14 Phan Huy Ích, Ba Dinh, Hanoi
Time: 17.00–20.30
Date: 31 August 2018
SYMBIOSIS forms a part of the FAMLAB (Film, Archive and Music Lab) strand of Heritage of Future Past, a British Council in Vietnam project that engages with Vietnam’s music and film heritage, especially those currently under-threat or under-represented. Within the project framework, FAMLAB creates opportunities for revisiting and rediscovering certain heritage elements, in the process enabling connection between values from before and expressions of today.
SYMBIOSIS also marks the launch of the FAMLAB Fund initiative which will provide grant packages to artistic or creative projects that fit the general criteria set out by FAMLAB.
SYMBIOSIS: THE GIFT OF SOUND AND VISION
SESSION 1: FOLK FOR FUTURE – JOEL MILLS – 17.00–18.00
'The presentation will take us through a whistle stop tour of folk music in the UK and introduce some of the artists, festivals and people who help make it a contemporary and thriving scene, as well as explore the opportunities for creative use of archives.' (Joel Mills)
Joel Mills is Senior Programme Manager, Music at British Council. She has worked in the music sector for over 20 years with a background that straddles both the commercial and funded sector.
Joel joined the British Council in 2009. She spent several months in South Africa covering maternity leave as Director Arts, Sub Saharan Africa. Since joining the Music team she has enjoyed working on a number of projects including Resound, the 75th Anniversary Concert; overseeing the British Council's contribution to London 2012 River of Music; The Light Surgeons' audio-visual and music live cinema commission SuperEveryhing*; Folk Nations, a project linking India and UK folk artists and organisations, as well as numerous showcases, collaborations and projects. She is currently inspired by working on cross art form collaborative projects, including the Film and Music programme.
SESSION 1.5: FAMLAB FUND PRESENTATION 18.00–19.00
Initiated by British Council UK, the inaugural FAMLAB took place in London in February-March 2016, bringing together 16 artists and producers from the UK and East Asia. The experimental platform served to engender possibilities in collaborative work between the worlds of music, film and visual archive.
Within the framework of Heritage of Future Past, the Vietnam edition of FAMLAB promotes the meeting of music/film heritage and contemporary practices through various residencies in the country.
FAMLAB Fund is the British Council’s initiative that provides a total of £100,000 (approximately three billion VND) in grant funding to support projects that engage with the music or film heritage of Vietnam through contemporary mediums. The grants will be awarded via four rounds of open call – two in the first year of the project, and two in the second year.
Further details about FAMLAB Fund shall be revealed at the talk.
SESSION 2: FILMING MUSIC HERITAGE – BARLEY MORTON – 19.30–20.30
'Throughout the world there are increasing efforts to preserve and promote cultural heritage. Films are often made about music heritage, but what purpose do they serve? How should heritage films be made and what should they focus on? What scope is there for artistic creativity in revival projects that emphasise the audio-visual documentation of endangered traditions? In this talk, Barley Norton will discuss different approaches to filming music heritage and will show some video clips from his projects in Vietnam and from the short films submitted to UNESCO’s Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The talk and discussion will provide an opportunity for people interested in music and film to learn more about innovative filmmaking techniques and the cultural politics of audio-visual representation. It also celebrates the recent publication (in July 2018) of Barley’s coedited book Music as Heritage.' (Barley Norton)
Barley Norton is a reader in Ethnomusicology and Director of the Asian Music Unit (AsMU) in the Music Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. At Goldsmiths, he runs the master’s degree in ethnomusicology, which includes a course on ethnographic filmmaking. He has conducted research on Vietnamese music and culture since the 1990s and has spent over 3 years in Vietnam. His publications include the film Hanoi Eclipse: The Music of Dai Lam Linh, the monograph Songs for the Spirits: Music and Mediums in Modern Vietnam, and the coedited book, Music and Protest in 1968, which won the American Musicology Society’s 2014 Ruth A. Solie Award.