dogpossum – Page 10

Playing jazz music in the age of COVID

So we know that musicians need/want to work. And we also know that their work (and creative practice) involves risky behaviour. So how do we make sure musicians minimise risk, for themselves and their audiences?
The best model is really to have musicians develop safe work practices, then peer-pressure their colleagues into doing things the safe way. Then as a group presenting these safe methods as a solution to employers.

Because the laws of each city and country vary, and advise given is varying, musicians need to take the facts about covid spread, and adapt them to produce their own working model.
I think that sex workers are a great parallel. They know that STIs like HIV/AIDS are a real risk in their work. But they also know how to minimise risk. They’re good at hygiene. They set boundaries with clients. They’re good at disclosure when necessary. But all of course, only if they work within a safe workplace, and aren’t disempowered by their work being criminalised. If they are empowered by legal protection, they can set rules that minimise their risks, without having to also worry about police (arrest or blackmail/’protection’.)

In the case of both sex workers and musicians, we know that abstinence isn’t a good option :D Both groups want to and need to work in their chosen industry. We can also assume that both groups are specialists in their work and workplaces, and can develop safe (or harm minimising) work practices.

So if we work with this as a model, what can musicians do to minimise the risk of getting and spreading covid?

We know how to prevent the spread of covid, and it has parallels with HIV/AIDS:

Wear an effective prophylactic
Know how to use and dispose of prophylactics properly
Practice good hygiene (washing hands, and washing hands properly; cleaning tools properly)
Avoiding disease-specific transmission.
Being able to set rules and then enforce them, even with bullying employers or clients.

In terms of a musicians’ work:

Wear a mask. And it has to be an effective mask that still allows them to do their job. So while a sex worker could choose to wear a hazmat suit, they go with condoms and dams instead. Similarly, musicians must choose which type of mask does the job, but doesn’t impede their work.
Know how to put on, wear, and then remove and dispose of masks without touching them. This takes training.
Regular hand washing. Not dumping spit from a brass instrument onto the floor. Cleaning instruments regularly and properly. Not sharing mics. Keeping mics clean and stored correctly. Wiping down mic stands. Not touching audience members or other musicians.
Understanding that covid spreads via respiratory droplets, which are spread by snot and spit in the air (as aerosol transmission) or via surface contact (wiping your nose, shaking hands, then than person touching their own nose). So this means not touching your face while you play gigs. It also means keeping 1.5m from other people, and having the right ventilation.
This is the most important one. Once musicians have some good processes and rules in place for themselves and their groups, they then present them to employers as a list of solutions that they take as a requirement for a gig. They’re in a good position to do this atm, as venues are desperate to make $$.

When you write it out like this, you can see some obvious challenges. eg not touching other people in your band? Hard. So perhaps you develop a ‘bubble’ (to use NZ’s powerful language), and you only play with people who are inside that bubble. Any new people who come along to sit in with your bubble must take additional precautions.

None of these things are set out as ‘rules’ in government guidelines. But they take what we know about the virus and minimising risk, and then apply it to this specific case.

But once we have these sets of industry-specific guidelines (‘safe jazz’ vs ‘safe sex’), we need to communicate them to all the musicians, and we need individuals to adopt and enforce them themselves.
Peer pressure! Because jazz is so male dominated, and so dominated by straight white men who are already very good at enforcing hierarchies and specific behaviours, they could actually be really good at this. At this stage, though, I’m seeing jazz musicians normalising unsafe behaviour by talking about what they’re currently doing, by teasing or shaming musicians who do stricter harm reduction.

So, musician friends, how are you minimising risk while playing at the moment?
Here are things you’ve listed already:

4. DOING OUTDOOR GIGS
This is a good one. But does wet weather contingencies (eg awnings overhead) maintain the harm reduction of not having walls or ceilings?
1 and 2: WEARING MASKS
Another useful one, but it’s being applied inconsistently.
– Some of you have said that the audience have to wear masks, but only if they’re not eating or drinking.
– Are venue staff wearing masks?
– Are musicians wearing masks? And then, more importantly, are they wearing effective masks (ie clean and effective), and
– are they _not_ touching or contaminating masks?
– Do they dispose of masks correctly?
– If you’re wearing masks while traveling to and from gigs (which Chris has illustrated), are these same guidelines being applied?
Good options:
Venues provide masks for musicians, punters, and staff. They are a requirement in booking the gig.
Bands provide masks for the whole group.
Bands spend time before the gig refreshing training about how to use a mask safely – eg how to put a mask on or take it off if you’re playing sax :D And when that’s impractical, how to use a mask while traveling together to gigs.
Disposing of masks safely is super super important. Are they being chucked on the floor of the band’s van like an old coffee cup? Or disposed of properly.

…and so on. You can see where I’m going with this.

THE most important part will be having high status, high visibility musicians practicing safe jazz, and then being really cool while they do it. :D

Sit down, white people.

So it seems that white people are having trouble dismantling racism in the lindy hop world.

Despite at least 30 years* of hard work, we haven’t seen dancers deconstruct systems that privilege white men (for DJing, teaching, MCing, band, and other high profile gigs).
Because the people with the power are white men, who, when it comes down to it, just don’t want to give up their own spot on a prestigious teaching/DJing/band/event team.
I can count on the fingers of one finger the number of times I’ve seen a white person give up a high profile gig _publicly_ for a person of colour. And that was a genderflex person. I know people** surely do this stuff in private…

…wait. Do they? I know women and trans folk who do. But straight white cismen? Hm.
Basically, if we want shit to get sorted, white bros have to sit the fuck down. Or better yet, book the room, put the kettle on, and get in the kitchen to keep the cake coming, so everyone else can get shit done.

You know, watch and learn, rather than trying to manage other people into doing what they want. Again.

I know that my job, as a white woman, is to shoosh. It’s to be that person who clears the path so that Aunty can get to her seat and sit down comfortably before bringing the smackdown. I know that my job is to get people of colour – particularly women of colour – onto stages, with microphones in their hands to talk about anything they like. To give them the physical space in a class to do and say and teach anything they want. I also know it’s my job not to interrupt a group of black women deep in conversation in the bar, even if I really want to hang out with them.

Sit down and listen, white people. The adults are talking.

I’m actually a fan of letting go of how we (white people) have been doing things _generally_. Maybe waiting for black leadership to get behind isn’t the way forward?
It’s something I’m really interested in.

Instead of assuming that things are basically ok as they are, they just need more melanin, we could start by assuming that we’ve been making a mess here, white people. So stop with the white supremacy. White ideas do not reign supreme; white ways of doing things are not the best.

White people: instead of pushing for assimilating poc colour into white institutions, why not just assume the institutions are inherently racist, and learn something from Black culture about how to do things in different ways?

It’s an idea I’ve been chasing in my thinking about gender roles in lindy hop.

White people: instead of trying to salvage 1950s gender roles and the way they’ve been mapped onto lindy hop, why not just assume _these_ institutions are hopeless, and learn something from Black culture about how to do gender? I mean, Black dancers have been trying to tell us for years and years: we don’t do gender like that, so don’t go reading Black heterosexuality like it’s white heterosexuality. So, white people, why don’t we just believe them? Is it that we just don’t trust Black people to truly be right?

So I’m thinking (especially in this moment of pause, where covid19 is giving us a chance to reboot), why don’t we just assume the way we’ve been doing things in lindy hop is dumb and restart?

I know white people and especially white men, abhor a power vacuum, and perceive alternative modes of interaction as vacuum (do straight white men see in the egalitarian spectrum?), but hold off trying to fix things for just a tick.

Nathan Sentance wrote a great article called ‘Diversity Means Disruption’, and I went to town on it here, so I won’t go into it again now. Also it is bedtime for me

*People have been talking and acting on this same old shit since lindy hop got popular with white people (again).
**And by people I mean white cismen.

covid19, HIV/AIDS, and community responses

A straight white male musician recently commented in a discussion about covid19 that covid19 and AIDS have not had the same effects on the community. I disagree.

Actually the comparison with AIDS is particularly powerful because it _did_ see a community shut down social spaces and completely change cultural practices. Gay men closed bath houses, changed the way they used beats, and started setting up community-led responses. It’s important to remember that in the late 70s and early 80s beats, bath houses, and other forms on anonymous sex were central to gay male culture in the US, UK, and Australia. Having a number of sexual partners, and being sexually active (often in public or privatised public places) was very much the norm.

There’s a substantial degree of heterocentism at work in a dismissal of the comparison of AIDS and covid. ‘We’ didn’t close down cinemas at the height of the AIDS crisis, but popular cruising spots (including queer porn cinemas) were closed in various American cities.
The gay community’s response to AIDS was impressive in part because they/we were already politically active and organised. There were grassroots networks in place to spread information.

The greatest obstacle to managing AIDS in the early days was conservative governments downplaying its significance because it was considered ‘a gay disease’.
In both cases, behavioural change is the most effective way of managing the disease.
As a side note, the majority of HIV cases (centred in Asia) are the result of intravenous drug use. We also know that sex work is another high risk activity. In the latter case, again community activist groups have been central to reducing the spread of the virus.
And, in both covid and AIDS, we know that poverty is the greatest contributing factor to mortality. Social and cultural change would reduce the spread of these viruses, specifically, reducing poverty and racism.

Stop AIDS and covid: vote, and vote for socially conscious parties.

ACON has released an updated statement on covid19 and casual sex. ACON was originally founded as a community group focussing on HIV/AIDS awareness in the gay community in Sydney. You can see how their skills in community health education regarding AIDS/HIV have stood them in good stead in terms of providing a _trusted_ source of information about covid19 for Sydney’s gay community.

Slavery in Australia

CW: slavery, race, violence. This article contains disturbing images. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this article contains the names and images of people who have died.

The Australian PM Scott Morrison said on Thursday morning (on 2GB) that “It was a pretty brutal place, but there was no slavery in Australia.”

This is a big fat lie. It’s such a bald faced lie, it’s beyond laughable. It’s… shocking.

Slavery in Australia:

‘Blackbirding’, where people from Pacific Islands were kidnapped, transported to Queensland, and forced to work on cane farms. With the introduction of the White Australia policy, any of the survivors (many died) were deported.
Indentured labour on properties.
Black men were forced to work for rations on rural properties. The most famous example of this is the Gurindji people (Northern Territory) who were forced to work for white pastoralists on Wave Hill Station with no pay, unable to leave. In 1967 Vincent Lingiari led a walk off, where Black workers started protesting. This eventually led to the Aboriginal Land Rights Act in 1976.
Indentured domestic labour.
Black women and girls were forced to work for rations in white people’s homes. They were unable to leave, and were frequently the target of sexual assault.
The Stolen Generations.
Black children were taken from their parents and institutionalised (placed in ‘care’) or with white families. In both cases they were physically restricted from leaving.
Stolen Wages.
Black adults and children were forced to work for whites, and told their pay had been taken into care by their ’employers’. To quote the attached article,

…the Queensland “Protection Acts” in force between 1939 and 1972 required the wages of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers be paid to the protector or superintendent of an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander district, reserve, settlement or mission.

This money has never been received by black workers or their descendants.
Protectorates, Reserves, and Missions.
Aboriginal people were forcibly restricted to white-run institutions, where they worked for nothing, were not able to marry who they choose, were separated from family, and brutalised by white staff. These institutions continued until the 1970s.

Pay the rent

what should we do when a white teacher rewrites history to make them look virtuous?

I’m not sure if this question from a fb discussion refers to deleting comments, or about teaching practice.
If it’s the former, then it’s a matter of poor social media management. It’s quite common for inexperienced SM managers to delete difficult posts. With more experience, SM managers learn to engage with this sort of comment in a more constructive way. So I’ll set that aside as a separate issue.

If it’s the latter (and I paraphrase), ‘What should we do if a white teacher presents a false or misleading view of history to make themselves look like a really good person,’ then that’s a different issue. Again, I’m not really sure how to address this, because Black people have been telling us the answer for years. We just haven’t been listening.

So I’ll present another question:

How should we respond to white teachers who whitewash the black history of Black dance?
How should we respond to white people in positions of power who tell a story of black history where white crimes and Black suffering are marginalised?

White teachers who don’t talk about the Black history of a dance are deliberately devaluing the impact of colonialism, of slavery, of segregation, of racism, (all white actions) on Black experience. If we, white people, don’t acknowledge the white actions of the past, we can avoid being held accountable for our ancestors’ behaviour. If we establish our white ancestors as ‘good people’, we defend and develop our own right to talk with authority about the topic (dance).

In fact, ‘dance’ is stripped of its racial markers and becomes just ‘dance’ rather than ‘black dance’, or ‘Black dance’. That’s a good example of cultural appropriation – taking the culture of another people. And in this case, then commodifying it – making it into a product from which we benefit financially. It’s also a good example of colonialism: white people invading black country, taking the bits they want with violence, then retelling the history of that country to hide their own brutality.

So how should we respond to this?
Our own power and ethnicity make a difference. Our role in reparation and repair is commensurate with our own privilege. In other words, the more power we have, the more we can and should do. So, middle class white people who have and still do benefit from Black oppression, you have a lot of work to do.

If Black dance is cultural country, and white dance teachers today are cultural imperialists, then what should we do?
As Aboriginal Australians say, we must “pay the rent”. I’m going to use this example from Black activist thinking to answer:

Since the, 1970’s there have been repeated calls by Indigenous activists for non-Aboriginal Australians to ‘Pay the Rent’ to the rightful Indigenous land owners for the occupation of land in Australia and/or in recognition of Indigenous sovereignty.

Since then, the ‘Pay the Rent’ scheme, has been actively operating to provide, opportunities for non-Indigenous Australians to support initiatives controlled by the traditional land owners in their struggle for self-determination and economic independence.

Today ‘Pay the Rent’ is a reasonable, rational and responsible way of ensuring the survival of the oldest living culture in the world.

It is a significant contribution to the process of Reconciliation, and embracing its philosophy is a sign of growing maturity among today’s ‘Australians’.
”
(source: https://www.invasionday.org/pay-the-rent-campaigns)

So here’s a good model for ‘what we should do’ when faced with white colonialism in dance:

– White people should support Black projects and activism.
With money, with signal boosting, with personal support, by contributing labour. _Support_ is the key word. Not co-opt or invent alternative responses.

In this specific case, then, white people, it’s time to pay the rent. I know I personally can’t change the way Egle and other teachers like her (and there are plenty of them) think and act. But there are other things I can do:
– Instead of watching their videos or attending their classes or events, I can watch videos of Black dancers, and attend Black run events.
– Instead of giving these teachers my money, I can donate to funds like the Frankie Manning Foundation, or the Maputo Swing fundraisers.
– I can stop sharing and promoting events, routines, music, and other cultural product by white people, and _start_ sharing and promoting Black dance and music.
– When I hear a white teacher give an historic dance step a new name, I can butt in with the original Black name. I can interrupt white mapping of Black country. Yes, even in class. Speak truth to power.
– If I hear a white teacher teach an historic step without name-checking the Black choreographer or Black history of that step, I can interrupt and say their name. Speak truth to power.

If all these sound familiar, it’s because Black people have been asking you to do these thing for YEARS. You just haven’t been listening.
If all these sound boring or uninspiring, it’s because it’s not about YOU and your creativity. It’s about you getting out of the way so that Black artists can reclaim Black country.
If these sound intimidating or scary, it’s because white imperialism is an act of terror and cultural theft. Be brave. Stand up. Pay the rent.

Run with me!

If you like jazz and adrenaline, then you might like my new project, Run With Sam. It’s free, it’s easy, and you don’t need any special gear.

Want to start running?
Run with me!
I’m full of good intentions, but I don’t always follow through. So I wouldn’t mind a bit of company.

I’m using interval training to get from zero to being able to run for 30 minutes.

Do some teacher training!

Ok, dancers, another thing you can do, while you’re not allowed to lindy hop because you might kill someone.

Do some teacher training, on your own or with your teaching team:

Learn about the history(s) of dances, and how you will integrate that into your classes so it’s fun and useful, and not just a bunch of lecturing at students;

Do an online lecture/tutorial with a dance historian, to get all your ducks in a row and learn about a particular moment in history, or a particular dance.

eg I once did a private with Loggins to learn the difference between two-step and other dances.
You could do a session with Teena Morales-Armstrong about black dances from the 50s onward (Hand dancing? Fast Dancing?) so you can stop saying shit like ‘black dance stopped after lindy hop in the 50s.’
How about a session with Marie N’diaye about chorus lines and what they actually _did_ in their working days?

Do a session with a teacher like Anders Sihlberg about how to structure a class, how to move from a particular move or technical thing to a whole class that’s actually fun;

Do a session with someone like Sylwia Bielec about how to train your staff and structure a syllabus

It’s usually really hard to get these people to stay in one city for an hour so you can drain their brains. Take advantage!

There are other fun topics you could work on:

Developing a solid OH&S policy that actually addresses sexual harassment in a sensible way (oh, and germ safety :D );
Putting some affirmative action policies in place, so that you can actually get some diversity on your teaching team: people of different ethnicities, different body shapes, genders, etc;
Sketching out a funding plan for the next few years to take advantage of any funding that’s coming up (think arts, sport, health, economic development, small business, etc)

And so on.

they are not shocked

They are no ‘outraged’ because they are not ‘shocked’. There is nothing shocking about racist violence perpetrated by police because it is normalised. It is seen as legitimate violence. It is this legitimate violence that was not only used to steal the country and assert white dominance but also maintain it through the oppression of Aboriginal people.
source

How to be ‘public’ dancers in a covid19 world

I think you all know that I took a break from teaching and running classes last year in about June, before I went away for a long trip. I found it gave me a real break, and I liked it. Though I truly missed the actual teaching part, I didn’t and don’t miss the everyday pressure of management and promotion.

I pivoted a bit, and put more energy into DJing, running live band gigs and weekend events, and I got a bit more into pattern drafting (completely non-dancing related creative fun). And then I started doing 3 days a week of dance practice with a partner, and I was much happier. It’s been many years since I just did dance stuff for my own pleasure and satisfaction. More, please.

This week I’m actually beginning to feel like being creative in a dance-related way. I was really inspired by the little bit of the WHO fundraiser I saw. It was so nice to see people in my timezone and region (Asia) doing normal dance stuff (Vietnam were social dancing), and to hear and see Sing talking about dance <3 And it was lovely to be an audience and listen to friends DJ. I liked it because it was a new thing for me. When I stopped running the classes, I feel a disconnect a few other dance friends have expressed lately. What should I write in email newsletters? Who was I talking to? What did I have to say? I felt like my personal voice was subsumed by the 'voice of the business', and I was uncomfortable with that. So now I'm working on 'stuff I love' and 'stuff I want to do‘.

I’ve been thinking that small events and projects are going to come first in the post-COVID and living-with-COVID world, for safety’s sake. And that a smaller, local focus will perhaps be much more fulfilling and personally stimulating than huge-market stuff. Whether it’s a small class, or a small party where people just socialise in a normal human way, with talking and food and drink and music and dancing, rather than the strange modern lindy hop way, which is nothing but dance.

This hard reset could be a good thing for all of us. As Jon Tigert says in a fb discussion, “Im much more fulfilled by local interactions,” and perhaps this could be a much better, healthier and sustainable direction for lindy hop. Small scale, fulfilling participation in local culture, that can focus on equity and justice and joy and satisfaction on a smaller, more sustainable scale. Rather than thinking ‘I have to spread and preserve lindy hop’, we can think ‘I want and need to have meaningful social interactions because we could go back into iso any time, and I know I miss this real human contact. It’s what feeds my heart.’

And our ‘marketing’ could take that angle: real social interactions that help us get through hard times.

Bunya pines and murri knowledge

There are a bunch of bunya pines in Ashfield park, and a huge one up on Charlotte Street. The pine cones are epic huge. HUGE. And edible.

They only grow wild in Gubbi Gubbi, Waka Waka, and Yuggera country, places which have been called South East Queensland since invasion.
A story about Bunya Dreaming festival.

Queensland is a huge state, and the land it covers now is the country of a whole host of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
The Bunya Pine grows in only a small part of this territory, in country cared for by three people (Gubbi Gubbi (aka Kabi Kabi), Waka Waka, and Yuggera.
I used the AIATSIS map and the The Australasian Virtual Herbarium map to figure this out.

There are other stands of Bunya Pines in other parts of Australia, but they are much smaller.
Bunya pines fit into the ‘bush tucker’ family of noms, and I know my local Sydney foody friends have been experimenting with using their nuts to make pesto.

This website is a useful tool for learning about agreements treaties and negotiated settlements in Australia.