ARTZ Notes

Join us on  May 14th at 1:30 pm (EDT). After you register, we will send you the Zoom link and instructions.

Sounds surround us day and night, but how are we listening to them? How can we engage with and learn from our acoustic environments – both natural and human-made? This workshop explores storytelling through sound and the amazing sonic textures of percussion instruments. Participants are guided through deep listening experiences that will both center us and awaken our creative imagination. We will also engage in interactive music making utilizing our bodies, voices, and found objects.

Alex Shaw is a Philadelphia-based percussionist, sound artist/composer, cultural producer, and arts educator working in the field for over twenty years. Intercultural, interdisciplinary collaborations and compositions merging diverse percussion traditions, vocal textures, field recordings, and digital imagination encompass his current artistic focus. He is the director of Alô Brasil, and has performed with the award-winning Spoken Hand Percussion Orchestra for over a decade. Alex has produced dozens of public performances and cultural programs including Consciência Negra: The Legacy of Black Consciousness in Brazil (2016), The Mandinga Experiment (2016), Co-Director of Modupúe | Ibaye: The Philadelphia Yoruba Performance Project (2017-2019), and Revivals of Blackness (2020-2021). He is the former Artistic Director for Intercultural Journeys (2014-2020), a founding board member and lead teaching artist for World Cafe Live since 2008, and a faculty member at University of the Arts since 2010. Alex has received several competitive artist grants and an Emerging Legacy Award at the UPenn MLK Commemorative Symposium for Social Justice. His teachers include Giba Conceição, Bernardo Aguiar, Gabriel Policarpo, Eduardo Santos, Randy Gloss, Nani Agbeli, Kahlil Cummings, Mestre Cobra Mansa, and Mestre Valmir Damasceno, among others. He holds a BA from Swarthmore College and an MFA in World Percussion from the California Institute of the Arts