Conference Report 2020
English Dance and Song Winter 2020
This article appears in English Dance and Song, the magazine of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. The world’s oldest magazine for folk music and dance, EDS was first published in 1936 and is essential reading for anyone with a passion for folk arts.
On the weekend of 10-11 October, the Library hosted its triennial Tunes Conference. Library and Archives Director, Tiffany Hore, discusses the challenges and rewards of moving the event online for the first time.
Triennial Tunes Conference moves online
On the weekend of 10-11 October, the Library hosted its Traditional Tunes and Popular Airs: Exploring Musical Resemblance conference. This would ordinarily have been a weekend for people to meet, mingle, and socialise, and to play music together in a single physical space. 2020 though, as we are all painfully aware, is far from normal. While I have resisted with some vehemence the term ‘new normal’ – there is nothing ‘normal’ about operating a ‘library’ from our scattered abodes - we have become used to conducting our whole lives on Zoom – meetings, pub quizzes, birthday parties - and now conferences.
We abandoned by mid-summer any hope of holding an ‘old normal’ conference. In July, when I started as Library and Archives Director, the decision to go online had already been taken by Malcolm Barr-Hamilton, my interim predecessor, along with our conference partners: Julia Bishop (University of Sheffield), Rebecca Dellow (researcher and fiddle player) and Alice Little (University of Oxford, and holder of a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship with EFDSS). However, can one simply move a conference to Zoom and retain the traditional structure of the in-person event? We considered the reality of sitting alone (except perhaps for the cat) in front of one’s screen, as if trapped in a Zoom vortex of stacked personal squares, for seven hours each day and decided a more flexible approach was needed. Presenters would pre-record their papers for us to send to delegates a week in advance, on private passworded Vimeo links. The event itself would be a discussion forum to which attendees could bring their questions for the speakers, arranged into conventional facilitated panels.
New challenges
This unconventional approach required a leap of faith: how would it work technologically? Would people watch the papers in time? Would it preclude people from booking late for fear of not having time to prepare? Would the presenters be willing to rise to this challenge? Would they even have time amidst planning for new, abnormal, university terms? Would delegates have enough questions? We catastrophised about presenters pulling out, scant bookings, technical hitches getting videos published in time, and stony silences on the day when questions were invited. None of us wanted to run it like this, but we chose very deliberately to focus on the positive results a Zoom conference may bring.
Our biggest hope was that being online would make it accessible to many more people than usual, allowing discourse across borders. Personally speaking, if the cancellation of my usual daily activities this year has done one thing, it has been to make my home life more international. Instead of catching the tube to ballet class, I have offset the difficulties of dancing round my furniture by taking class with a New York City Ballet principal on Instagram, alongside people from dozens of countries. Recently I attended a discussion with a duduk player in Armenia, hosted from New York and compered from Chicago. While nothing can replace traditional human interaction, these experiences have been genuinely enriching opportunities. Could our conference achieve similar?
A rewarding new experience
Happily, the answer appears to have been a resounding ‘yes’. Videos were pre-recorded by 21 speakers from across the UK, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, the USA, Canada and El Salvador. Attendees were equally scattered. Several presentations reflected this, covering musical traditions other than that of England, allowing delegates to make connections and discuss common themes which enriched their own research. So many questions were brought that the sessions could have been twice as long, and the written chat was just as lively. Many arranged to stay in touch and collaborate in future. Our feedback also showed that the format allowed several people with physical access requirements, who would have been unable to travel to London, to attend. The fact that videos were available beforehand and for a time afterwards proved valuable to many, who were able to re-visit sections at their leisure. One delegate admitted to not having watched all the videos as most fell outside his specialist area. However, the lively nature of the weekend discussions encouraged him to view them after the event; he was delighted he could do this.
In addition to the academic part of the conference, Rebecca Dellow and Jeff Gillett led a music session on Saturday evening. As it is impossible for a large group of musicians to play live together on Zoom owing to the sound lag, participants were invited to lead a tune in turn while others remained muted to either listen or play along at home. A great number of people took their turn, leading to a lively evening of real joy and connection.
Looking ahead
None of our pre-conference anxieties proved founded. Nobody can know how long it might be before it is once again practical to travel to a single place, to meet and mingle. This is difficult, often painful; none of us can accept a future devoid of tangible human connection, of physical presence in the lives of others. However, being forced to adapt to this hackneyed ‘new normal’ need not prevent us from creating real spaces for the exchange of ideas and art. The rest of the Library’s events this winter and spring will be forced into a similar mould, but we move forward sure of the opportunities we have to increase our reach, widen our discourse, and inspire each other from our kitchen tables, wherever in the world they may be.
