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SPRC Curatorial Praxis Series: Spirit of the Pan-Yard

19 March 2024, 5:30 pm–7:30 pm

Spirit of the Pan-Yard

The Sarah Parker Remond Centre welcomes Sharmilla Beezmohun in conversation with Dominique Le Gendre.

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

The UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation

Location

Common Ground, G11
Gower Street, South Wing
London
WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom

The Steelpan yard in Trinidad is a constant source of inspiration for Trinidadian artists of all ages, across art forms. The instruments of the orchestra, steelpans of all sizes and musical ranges, symbolize transformation; the very first instruments emerged from experimentation and exploration in tuning the metal drums that housed the oil drilled from Trinidad’s oil - rich seas and land. The yard, a literal open yard or unused open space in any given neighbourhood in Trinidad, becomes the focal point for communities to gather for practice sessions, to play pan, to listen, to help keep order, to discuss the band’s progress and the arrangements, to provide services needed by the band for competitions or even just to sit and be transported by the rituals of practice.

Through conversations and questions, we will explore how meaningful collaborative practice can locate ‘pan-yards’ to embrace multiple perspectives, meander towards new convivialities and shape collective transformation in view of climate change.

About the Speakers

Dominique Le Gendre

Composer, Music Producer, co-founder/artistic director of StrongBack Productions

Dominique LeGendre
Dominique Le Gendre is a Composer, Music Producer, co-founder/artistic director of StrongBack Productions, Dominique was born and brought up in Trinidad. She studied the classical guitar, while accompanying her local church choir and writing calypsos for the annual school calypso competition. Dominique trained as classical guitarist in Paris with Ramon de Herrera,  studied Harmony with Yvonne Desportes and Music Analysis with Christian Accaoui while studying Musicology at the Sorbonne.

London based for over 35 years, she has composed music for theatre, dance, art installations, film, television and radio drama for BBC Radio 3 and 4. She composed and produced all of the music for the Arkangel Complete Shakespeare collection directed by Clive Brill.

A former associate Artist of the Royal Opera House and Manning Camerata, Dominique’s music has been commissioned and performed internationally and in the UK by BBC Radio 3 Proms, Southbank Sinfonia, ORA Singers, Vasari Singers, Nevis Ensemble, Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, Calabash Foundation for the Arts (Trinidad) and Turner Prize nominee Ingrid Pollard. Her concerto for orchestra, co-commissioned by the BBC Concert Orchestra and RTÉ Concert orchestra will receive its premiere in March 2024 and a new work for Australian piano/saxophone duo HDDuo will be recorded and performed across the Commonwealth from February 2024.

More about Dominique Le Gendre

Sharmilla Beezmohun

Co-founder/Director of Speaking Volumes Live Literature Productions

Sharmilla Beezmohun
Sharmilla Beezmohun has worked in publishing since 1994, training at Virago and on Heinemann’s African and Caribbean Writers Series. For eleven years she was Deputy Editor of Wasafiri, the Magazine of International Contemporary Writing. In 2010 She co-founded Speaking Volumes Live Literature Productions with Sarah Sanders, joined a year later by Nick Chapman. Speaking Volumes’ literature and multimedia projects, tours and events in the UK and abroad all have a commitment to social justice and racial equality. Sharmilla also continues to work as a freelance editor.

In 2010 Sharmilla’s first novel, Echoes of a Green Land, was published in translation in Spain as Ecos de la tierra verde. She edited the academic collection Continental Shifts, Shifts in Perception: Black Cultures and Identities in Europe (2016); and, with Sarah White and Roxy Harris, co-edited A Meeting of the Continents: The International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books — Revisited (2005). An anthology celebrating ten years of Speaking Volumes entitled Not Quite Right for Us: Forty Writers Speak Volumes edited by Sharmilla was published by flipped eye in 2021. Her work has been published in various journals and translated into Finnish.

Sharmilla is a Trustee of Carcanet Publishers and also of the George Padmore Institute, an archive housing unique collections of material from pioneering Black British political and cultural organisations of the last seventy years. For many years she was on the International Organising Committee of AfroEurope@ns, a cross-continent academic and cultural network.

More about Sharmilla Beezmohun