Arts advocacy organisation NewMusicSA(link is external) will present an online music series called Stories We Told Ourselves as part of this year’s Digital Indaba at the National Arts Festival Makhanda on 10 July.
 

The series is courtesy of the National Arts Council (NAC) and a professional development grant from the Arts & Culture Trust and Nedbank, and was curated by composer and music educator Daniel Hutchinson.

The series was created in isolation with six artists, including Reza Khota, Zorada Temmingh and Nicholas Aphane – who will showcase their improvisations on jazz guitar, pipe piano organ and expressive dance – as well as composers Eugene Skeef, Garth Erasmus and Kyla-Rose Smith, who will fuse original scores with photography, poetry and visual art. The show will weave together each artist’s experience of isolation during the COVID-19 lockdown and see them share the stories that helped them cope during this period.

NewMusicSA’s projects this year follow Digital Indaba’s theme of Connectedness, and include the aforementioned series, a concert series, a call for scores, workshops, outreach community activities and the commissioning of new works.

Digital Indaba is a contemporary music programme supported by the Rupert Music Foundation, the NAC, Arts & Culture Trust-Nedbank, the International Society for Contemporary Music and the Southern African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO).

“Our series attempted to address the topic from six different angles and present this work online,” Hutchinson said. “I appreciate how the commissioned artists not only found innovative ways to present their work visually, but also dug deep into fertile interdisciplinary ground to create the solo pieces for this series.”

Stories We Told Ourselves will start at 7pm CAT and interested viewers can watch it here(link is external).

Additionally, NewMusicSA, in partnership with SAMRO, the SAMRO Foundation and the NAC, will present a workshop series with four weekly webinars throughout July. The first webinar will be held on 11 July at 5pm CAT, and will feature the curator and artists of Stories We Told Ourselves. Viewers can stream the webinar here(link is external).

The other webinars will be dedicated to the new scores commissioned by NewMusicSA for Digital Indaba and its concert series, which premiered between March and May. Each webinar will be broadcast from 5pm CAT on 15, 22 and 29 July. Interested viewers can watch them via the following links here(link is external), here(link is external) and here(link is external).

For more information, visit the NewMusicSA official website(link is external).