Earlier this year I asked composer Alwynne Pritchard to write a piece which would should involve online collaboration with teenage girls from Norway, Brazil and the UK, and a piano part for me to perform.
Alwynne devised a very interesting concept, and a very clever series of activities for the girls to produce creative material, which would end up becoming a video & piano piece with the title of EVEVEVE. The idea was that I would premiere this piece in a concert at the Grieg Academy in March 2025.
This concert would be either live streamed of recorded, so the participants could watch it from wherever they are. Then, I would collect their feedback afterwards so as to write an article as part of my research.
In their feedback, i would specifically try to see how they felt when they watched the piece that they collaborated to: did they feel more connected to the music, and/or to the other participants?
In November 2025 we finally gathered a nice group of 6 participants – girls age 13 – 17, from Norway, Brazil, the UK, also France – and so we started the collaborative work with them.
We had a first workshop through Zoom where we explained the whole project, and set them to do the first activity on their own time during the next few days (not all the girls could be in this first workshop, so we met some of them separately to pass on the instructions).
The first activity was for them to write a text describing the place where they live. They could understand “place” the way they wanted: a country, a city, a room, even a desk. And they could be very creative, and they could (and should) invent some things too.
The participants indeed explored different ways to write their texts. Some of them described their cities very objectively, however giving glimpses of their own view of their places. Other girls focused more in their personal experience of the places where they are, telling things about their everyday lives and what are relevant to them. Other girls took a poetic approach, and some of them even made drawings and photos to go along the text.
Some of them wrote notes in their phones, some of them typed Word Documents, and some of them hand wrote their texts.
After that, we would then meet through Zoom, this time with all of them, so they could do the second task at the same time, during the online workshop.
To be continued…
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