oral expressions archive

Teatre L'ArtesĂĄ 2025

Exploring identity through language and remixing with students from the Institut Escola Pepa Colome and the Institut Salvador DalĂ­.

This taller belongs to the proyect: El Prat Laboratory

how to work with language from its acoustic dimension, and to do it in relation to the processes of individual identity construction? How to approach the artistic project in such a way that it allows all the participating agents to articulate it from their context and their times, from the classroom, from the center, from the theater, from the composition workshop?

These were some of the questions on the table at the beginning of the third and last year of intervention with the mediation team of Teatre L'Artesà and La Capsa. In this last year we feel that many of the objectives and intentions that we had been hovering around have come to fruition, on the one hand because of the time that is always needed in this area of intervention, on the other because of the collective work developed with the whole team of the Artesà and La Capsa with whom we have been weaving relationships, affections and closeness, and mainly because of the level of involvement and appropriation of the proposal by the teachers involved: Neus Albors, Sara Bobadilla and Francisco José Nadal, without whom it would not have been possible.

The approach has been to develop a process of musical creation with two groups of 3rd grade of the Institut Escola Pepa Colomer and 3 groups of 4th grade of the Institut Salvador DalĂ­, from a previous student work of research and approach to their cultural and identity realities. We wanted to work with family contexts and the mother tongue, to explore the diversity of origins in El Prat and the intergenerational differences in the use of spoken expressions. Through sound experimentation and composition with sampling, we have tried to generate a context in which the uses of the languages they handle can appear and be articulated in a playful way.

explore the compositions and sources used

Musical pieces

can we make music from sampling only with words? this was the challenge we posed to the students and they showed us that of course... without fear (and without previous knowledge) and with a lot of playfulness, the students started to compose experimental sound pieces in pairs from the recordings they had made in their family contexts at Christmas. Current oral expressions and those of their grandparents, interviews, everyday sounds and voices; with infinite generosity they have made music with all these sound materials: sampling, clapping words, syllables and vowels, and mixing their own ways of speaking with those of mothers, uncles and grandmothers.

The recordings and the work of situation and family genealogies that the teachers (Neus, Sara and Fran) have done in the classroom, allow us to explore the compositions from the sources used and their connection of kinship and cultural origin, which reflects the richness of the diverse linguistic character in which the children develop in El Prat.

You can listen to the pieces and their origins in this file of sound constellations developed by Esperanza Moreno... (better in full screen if you navigate from a computer):

3 years in El Prat 🧡

Results exhibition at Teatre L'ArtesĂĄ

As a final touch to these 3 years of collaboration, an interactive exhibition was mounted at the Teatre L'ArtesĂ  to tell and share all the work done.

In the entrance hall we set up a musical floor to explore some of the loops created by the more than 270 students who participated in the first year. In one of the dressing rooms we set up a projection room to see some of the interviews of the second year's working groups explaining how they had composed their sound pieces, interviews that were made in that dressing room while we worked on the theater stage the previous year with about 150 kids. The archive of sound constellations developed in this last course was installed on the main stage of the theater, with the visuals projected on the cyclorama that closed the stalls.

Hall / 2022-23
Camerino / 2023-24
Room / 2024-25
Sampling words in La Capsa

Workshop development

The beginning of the process was a sound documentation of jargons and daily expressions in their familiar contexts at Christmas. This work in the case of the Institut Escola Pepa Colomer was part of a school project on language, and in the case of the Institut Salvador DalĂ­ it was proposed to investigate youth misunderstanding in the family in order to create a stage play at the end of the course.

After the digital edition of these initial audios in the classroom, and a work of creation of family genealogical trees, the students developed 2 sessions of creation with us in La Capsa to compose their sound pieces. The compositional work was focused on creating rhythmic and ambient bases by sampling and word chopping, to later add phrases and expressions in a second layer with meaning. This compositional work was later continued in the music classroom with the teachers before the final presentation in April at the Teatre L'ArtesĂ .

Credits

design and development: Fran Torres and Rubén Alonso in collaboration with:

Salvador DalĂ­ High school: Neus Albors y Sara Bobadilla

Pepa Colomer High School: Francisco José Nadal

Coordination and mediation L'ArtesĂ : MarĂ­a Donoso and Cristina Alonso

Coordination and mediation La Capsa: LucĂ­a Vilchez and Paloma Mateos

entity: Teatre L'ArtesĂ  + La Capsa

participants: 4th ESO students of the Institut Salvador DalĂ­ and 3rd ESO students of the Institut Escola Pepa Colomer

place: El Prat del Llobregat

info: web teatro

year: 2025