On March 2 WWR will host a film festival free. On March 3 @ WWR will host a meeting built upon the workshop submissions from the community. All WWR film festival, workshop, and music events @ Seattle’s Historical Washington Hall are free and open to public. Children welcome!Participatory community music practice with Seattle Fandango Project & and local artist showcase. Attendees may participate in a oral history project documenting the histories of Women Who Rock in Seattle that will be hosted on-line by UW Libraries.Registration is free and open the public. Register to reserve your space @ https://catalyst.uw.edu/webq/survey/mhabellp/144086For more info click womenwhorockcommunity.org

Please don’t forget to register for the Women Who Rock:  Making Scenes, Building Communities Film Festival and Meeting. Registration for film festival and meeting is FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

Click here to register: https://catalyst.uw.edu/webq/summary/mhabellp/144086

THE INVITATION

We invite activists, scholars, musicians, filmmakers, and artists to submit proposals for topic-focused open workshops that will promote dialogue about women, music, and social justice, taking into account issues of gender, race, ethnicity, class and sexuality.  Inspired by the influence of gospel singer and guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe and punk pioneer Alice Bag, we encourage workshops that explore the ways that Chicana and Black feminist thought have expanded “who” counts as women and “what” counts as rock.

THE SPACE

This year’s theme asks us to consider the possibilities and limitations of space in relation to musical performance, production, expression, transformation, and community bu­­­­­­ilding.  We choose this topic to honor the space in which the conference will be housed this year: Seattle’s historic Washington Hall.  Located in the Central District, Washington Hall’s community and immigrant roots are deep.  This conference aims to honor the legacy of Washington Hall’s past performers and the Central District’s history of fostering music scenes and political organizing by exploring past and present spaces of women’s, queer and transgender musical performance.

Built in 1908 by the Danish Brotherhood in America, Washington Hall later became home in 1973 to the Sons of Haiti, an African American Masonic Lodge. All the while, from 1908-2001, the hall was used for musical and theatrical performances. The sonic vibrations of love generated by musicians and speakers such as Marian Anderson, Mahalia Jackson, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Jimi Hendrix, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Joe Louis reverberate in the building walls.  The performing arts organization, On The Boards, left its trace by hosting artists such as Spalding Grey, Meredith Monk, Mark Morris and Bill T. Jones.  Washington Hall is now the new home of progressive, community-based arts organizations such as Hidmo, Voices Rising, and 206Zulu.  We have the opportunity to activate the building’s musical “vibrations of love,” created and sustained, enjoyed and shared across generations. How do these musical vibrations create a sense of home in a hostile environment, helping to disrupt, re-imagine and reinvent the social and physical structures that shape everyday life?

THE VISION

Washington Hall’s current renovation inspires us to think about the spaces we move in and the places where we make our dreams, desires, and hopes manifest.  Though the hall is an unconventional conference space, we see its renovation as an opportunity to access the building in creative and unexpected ways, using spaces like the balcony, hallways, dressing rooms, and kitchen as meeting areas. Given the rich history of Washington Hall, we ask potential facilitators to consider the relationship between music, identity and space.  What kinds of alternative or autonomous spaces are created by musical performance?  How do past musical performances and expressions reverberate and echo in the space of the present?  What echoes and reverberations of this history do we hear in particular musical scenes and spaces?  How do musical vibrations change the feel of a room?  How does music and performance shape and transform the dynamics of space, engaging tensions between community and gentrification, home and displacement, visibility and invisibility, voice and silence?

THE LOGISTICS

We model this year’s conference after the idea of the “unconference.”  The unconference is participant-driven; it transforms conventional ways of gathering.  By structuring the conference around participant interest, keyed to the theme of space, we set the stage for dynamic dialogue and fortuitous encounters.  We ask workshop facilitators to guide this experimental vision.  We are particularly interested in creative, non-traditional, and/or musical session formats.  The conference will also showcase and contribute to the Women Who Rock Oral History Project.

GUIDELINES: 

1. We expect each workshop to begin with a presentation and/or performance of 5-10 minutes and then transition into a participatory workshop, driven by dialogue.
2. Each workshop will run for 45 minutes.

GENERAL PROPOSALS (WORKSHOPS, PRESENTATIONS, PERFORMANCES, CONVERSATIONS):

1. Names of facilitators, presenters and/or performers (along with other stage or nicknames)
2. Name of organizations, institutions, or affiliations
3. Your or your group’s bio (50 words max)
4. State how you will participate (i.e. facilitator, musical performer, artist, scholar, activist, educator)
5. A short, 250-word description of your topic or what your work demonstrates
6. A list of the goals of your workshop and a plan for how you will achieve them.
7. Proposals should be 500 words or less and include a description of the workshop format.
8. Group and individual workshop proposals or performances will be considered.

Questions? Contact Michelle Habell-Pallan, Sonnet Retman, Monica De La Torre, or Lulu Carpenter at womenwhorockproject@gmail.com.

Free registration: https://catalyst.uw.edu/webq/summary/mhabellp/144086

Possible workshop topics include, but are in no way limited to:

 Performing Community:

• The role of music scholars, critics, performers and archivists as well as Chicana and Black feminist theorists in crafting a feminist narrative of hip hop, punk, and indie rock
• Women performers and the art of DJ-ing, breakdancing, rhyming, graffiti art, vocalizing and spoken word
• Building community at the intersection of Hip Hop and Indie Rock
• Autonomous women-focused art collectives (ex. Mujeres de Maíz)
• Queer musical practices and interventions

 Sounds and Spaces:

• Music making as a local site of feminist community-building (examples include Ladies First, Home Alive, B-Girl Bench, Seattle Fandango Project and others)
• The role of performers, advocates, and educators in creating musical communities
• Creating a space for building connections between women in hip hop, indie rock/punk, and alternative rock cultures that share a similar ethos but rarely connect
• Connecting women who use music culture as a platform for pleasure and politics
• Linking local music communities and transnational musical movements (de CAJónN Project , Afro-Peruvian percussion)
• Musical and creative responses to immigration debates (SB 1070)
• Creating spaces of autonomous music making and sharing
• The role of community radio
• Internet and social networking
• Unexpected use of space and place for music making and listening

Communal Archives/Oral Histories:

• The politics of the archive; the archive as a site of community-making and historical praxis
• The archive as resource for performers, advocates, and scholars
• The archive as foundation for digital online and museum exhibits
• Presentation of oral histories

Collaborative spaces of production, performance, and distribution:

• Use of digital technologies for in-home production and recording
• Use of digital technologies for musical and scholarly collaboration
• Music communities as a vehicle for public humanities