creativity - event

Two weeks as an artists’ community

 

From 10 to 23 July 2012 Margriet and I, together with our friend, Katrin, from Berlin, formed a temporary artists’ community, based in my brother’s home in the Gerard Scholtenstraat in Rotterdam. (My brother and his girlfriend had agreed to swop houses with Katrin for two weeks, to make this possible.) My sister, Daphne, joined us for a few morning sessions, to draw us.

 

Here are some of the things we managed to fit into this two week window:

– play at two open mic sessions in Café de Bel (Gerard Scholtenstraat)
– attend a screening of a music documentary about Talking Heads at the beach in The Hague
– go sailing with friends
– attend a live recording of the TV programme, “Beste Singer-Songwriter van Nederland”, in Amsterdam
– go to the Boomtown festival in Gent (Friday night)
– experiment with paper
– experiment with improvising
– introduce Margriet to the basics of playing the ukelele
– work out four Dutch songs for our “Crème Brûlée” repertoire (incl one new tune)
– make a start on two other tunes for the “Crème Brûlée” repertoire (Irene)
– watch a BBC video series, “How Art Made the World”
– perform at ROOM hostel (thanks Arto from Brazil for listening so attentively)
– do some recording, incl a recording of one of Katrin’s songs
– make video recordings of the four “Crème Brûlée” songs we had arranged
– go to two music shops (incl a ukelele shop, where we met Marco and Shelly)
– check out books on songwriting from Irene’s collection
– cook, eat, sleep and get on with living …

 

We were so busy, there was hardly enough time to work on our own individual projects.

 

One comment on “Two weeks as an artists’ community

  1. These two weeks have been very fruitful for me – Irene and Katrin have shared so many of their gifts and talents with me.
    Enough to inspire me to grow in understanding art better, and in writing and performing music.
    It is for instance interesting to see what playing a chordal instrument, the ukelele, does with me: it makes me very happy and it stimulates me to sing at my very best.
    This is just one direct result of these two weeks,
    and if we talk about it more,
    perhaps when we meet at one of our performances,
    I look forward to sharing more.

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