The Athens Cultural Center and WGXC 90.7-FM announces an exciting participatory workshop, Audio Portraits: An Introduction to Interviewing, for ages 14-adult. In this workshop participants will produce a short audio portrait of the working life of an Athen's resident to be included in the Wage/Working Jukebox which will be on exhibit at the Athens Cultural Center, 24 Second Street from May 31-Dec. 1, 2014.
Wage/Working is a jukebox-based installation featuring stories and sounds from the working lives of residents of Greene and Columbia counties. The stories are edited to a length, corresponding with the amount of time it takes each interviewee to earn $1, creating an inverse relationship between monetary value and time. The project, which was first exhibited at the Cairo Public Library, was created by Tennessee Watson & Laura Hadden as a part of an AIR Live Interactive Residency during the Spring of 2013 at free103point9 Wave Farm, and WGXC 90.7-FM in Acra, NY, with financial support provided, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
In this two-session workshop participants will learn the basics of documentary interviewing technique, digital audio field recording, story scripting and digital editing through guided tutorials and hands-on exercises; and with facilitator support will assemble a short audio portrait.
Session 1 will take place Wednesday May 28th 6 – 9 pm and Session 2 will be on Friday, May 30th, 6 – 9 pm. Please note that participants must attend both sessions. Participants will also be required to do work outside of class prior to Session 2, which involves interviewing a community member about their work, reviewing the recording and creating a brief outline. These workshops, co-sponsored by WGXC, 90.7-FM, will take place at the Athens Cultural Center, 24 Second Street, Athens, and are offered free of charge but pre-registration is necessary. Register on-line at info@athensculturalcenter.org or by calling 518-945-2136.
On Saturday May 31, from 5-7 PM, there will be an Opening Reception of the Wage/Working Jukebox at the Cultural Center featuring a listening session and celebration of pieces produced in the Audio Portraits workshop.
About Laura Hadden and Tennessee Watson:
Hadden and Watson were cited in 2011 by the International Documentary Challenge in the Best Film and Best Directing categories for a previous joint project, Matthew 24:14. The collaborators have a diverse history working in documentary film and radio. Laura Hadden is an independent media producer who spent the last three years producing projects for the storytelling organization The Moth in New York City. Before that, she facilitated workshops at The Center for Digital Storytelling and was an apprentice and community media producer at KPFA in Berkeley, CA. Tennessee Watson is an artist and activist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work draws from the documentary and oral history tradition, but with an interactive and performative twist. Prior to moving to NY, she spent four years at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University producing radio documentaries, instructing courses and coordinating Youth Noise Network, a radio project for teens in Durham, North Carolina.
Already have audio production skills and you'd like to submit a story to the jukebox?
Community members, who don't take the workshop, are also invited to submit Wage/Working stories from Greene or Columbia county as long as they follow the project format. To have your work considered for inclusion in theWage/Working jukebox, please contact wageworking@gmail.com for more information.
Workshop sessions: May 28 and 30th, 6-9PM
Opening reception: May 31st, 5-7PM
Registration Register on-line at info@athensculturalcenter.org or by calling 518-945-2136.