Project : TáoShān Elementary School - 2010
August 23rd, 2010Atelier Hui-Kan started last year a collaboration with the TáoShān Elementary School, in Wufong Township, Taiwan.
The school is located in Atayal Aborigine area. The school gather children from the villages around. This school is well-known for quite unusual reason : there is a choir of children which performed in Taiwan and USA, and released two CDs which have been appreciated. If the children are regularly performing with their Atayal-style clothes, the music and way of singing is obviously based of western classical music.
We are invited to work in this area by the Cultural Affairs of Hsinchu County, for a “Art in the Communities” project. We chose to collaborate with one of the very few Atayal teacher of the school, who has great interest into Atayal cutlure and linguistics and who is leading a class for traditional Atayal music. This class involve the traditional songs, the wooden percussion, and the Atayal mouth harp. Classical western vocal music and Traditional Atayal music are the two main references for these children, but one should not forget their favourite music style : Taiwanese Rap !
Firstly we organized in November and December 2009 some listening sessions for the children : playing sounds of nature, traditional music from various indigenous people of the world, a bit of experimental music, discussing about the context of different form of musics. The response of the children were surprising with a great success of Inuit vocal games and Jaap Blonk sound poetry !
This year, our intention is to make a musical creation involving different aspect of Atayal culture. The aim is to involve the children and other people of the surrounding into the publication of a CD which could represent another aspect of Taoshan.
During this Summer, we are collecting some documents and interviews about Atayal in Taoshan. Recording of old stories from elder, making some mouth-harp, following a hunter on a track… We’ll keep this blog updated with some extracts of these experiences…
Wikipedia page about Atayal people.
See on a map where is TáoShān Elementary School.
See a few pictures (chinese text only) of the previous listening session.