Skills Lab Academy is back in full swing!
Last month, we kicked off with our first day of workshops focusing on collaborative facilitation for music leaders. Led by singer-songwriter and previous Trainee Music Leader Abimaro Gunnell and musicians from Multi-Story Orchestra, the group explored workshop skills, leadership techniques and inclusive practices to improve collaboration in music leading.
We started the day with a range of icebreaker and warmup activities, where we learnt amazing ways to connect with each other as a large group. We explored activities to help learn names, get to know each other and feel comfortable with one another. We learnt interesting new ways to use different group activities to explore new ways of collaborating to write song lyrics and develop musical ideas together.
In the afternoon, we welcomed Kate Whitley and musicians from the Multi-Story Orchestra to explore interesting ways of collaborating on our instruments in both small and big groups. Working in pairs, we developed some amazing musical ideas with weird and wonderful pairings of instruments. Pushing us out of our comfort zones, we reflected on how collaborating with instruments that don’t usually go together broke us out of the boundaries of classical music and allowed us to make new and experimental music. We talked about how we can ‘seize the moment’ when collaborating and take things we may have thought as limitations as opportunities to create something new.
Thank you to our amazing music leaders and to everyone that came along to the first day of Skills Lab, we hope to see you at our next session on 29th March!
