Hola, bonjour, hello Music!!

 Community Arts North West’s Kámoši Juniors group develop their story. 

This week, the Community Arts North West’s Kámoši Juniors group started  their workshop by learning how to say ‘hello’ and ‘how are you’ in Romanian. This then led to the group sharing different greetings in various languages such as Spanish, Czech, Romani, French, and Italian.

It was a great way to start the session, and the group picked up the different languages very easily. The group then split in half, with the younger participants doing music first whilst the older participants went over the road to As In Eden to do drama activities. In the music group, we looked at pictures that represented parts of the Roma folk story that Michael Cretu  had told us the previous week, and then chose a particular scene to create music for.

The group decided to make music for the ‘dancing gypsy’ scene, which happens at the beginning of the story. We were able to make some brilliant music because individual-children had brought their instruments along, so we were able to use guitars, piano, violin, and percussion.

After a short break, the older group also made some fantastic music for the army scene in the story, which involved everyone marching around whilst playing a marching beat on guitars, violin, percussion, and piano. The story is really starting to come alive with the group’s musical ideas, and their ability to re-tell the story and to remember narrative-details within each section of the story is extremely impressive.

Last Saturday lyricist and rapper Remi joined the Kamosi group for the first time, and his energy and talent made it a great session. Remi inspired the group to write their own lyrics and to experiment with different ways of rhyming words to fast and slow beats. He will be joining us again for a couple more sessions, so everyone will get the chance to develop their lyrics and create a piece of work that they will be proud of.