Wayside Days: Open Singing Circle
Schedule
Fri Sep 19 2025 at 04:30 pm to 06:30 pm
UTC-05:00Location
Art Preserve of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center | Sheboygan, WI
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🎟️ FREEPresenters: Dylan Bizhikiins Jennings, Tiffany Xiong, Sonya, and Richard Newman, Liza Bielby (co-directors) and Jenna Kirk of The Hinterlands.
Open Singing Circle is a gathering for all ages and abilities where The Hinterlands and friends will share and teach songs from different singing traditions to deepen our connection to lineage and place. You do not need to consider yourself a singer to participate. Through singing, we will explore listening, imagination, resonance, and storytelling, while experiencing the power of the human voice and visceral ways of being together in community.
Reflect with us on the common threads among all cultures: our lineages, our histories, and our futures of song.
Based on The Hinterlands’ Open Singing workshops (an extension of their theatre piece, Will You Miss Me?), JMKAC’s Wayside Days edition of Open Singing Circle will invite us to learn and reflect on songs that emerged from our collectively-generated cultures and lifeways at the Art Preserve, a home to works created alongside the oral traditions of cultures and communities from around the world. Presenters will each teach a song, or plant the seed of a song with participants, and talk about their experiences with language and music revitalization and reclamation, intergenerational education, methods of teaching and archiving, and how they keep traditional art forms contemporary for new generations.
Make time and space to celebrate and learn from culture bearers who will share Pow Wow, Appalachian, African American, and HMong Kwv Txhiaj songs. Sing the songs with the panel of presenters, or simply listen to the music and engage in the discussion of land and language revitalization, the state of the oral tradition today, and methodologies of transmission, archiving, and perhaps most importantly, making these songs vital and responsive to the world we live in.
About Open Singing
Since 2018, The Hinterlands have been engaged in deep research and practice with traditional songs from the U.S. (specifically Appalachian traditional song), as well as music from the British Isles, which were orally transmitted living folk traditions. This regular vocal practice includes working with these songs as visceral, vibratory containers: of personal and collective history, grief, wisdom, and identity. Through singing, one can uncover truths about cultural heritage and ask questions about the places and conditions in which the songs were created, sung, and passed on. The Hinterlands share songs and exchange singing traditions with community members through low barrier-to-entry all-age all-ability events called Open Singing. Collective singing – in someone’s home, on the porch, at work, while traveling—was once ubiquitous and all but disappeared when music-making was outsourced to “experts” on the radio and traditional songs were copyrighted by musicians and record labels. This radical reclaiming of song for anyone provides an opportunity to viscerally be together with others, to explore listening, imagination, resonance, and the power of the human voice.
This event is part of Wayside Days.
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Where is it happening?
Art Preserve of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 3636 Lower Falls Rd,Sheboygan, Wisconsin, United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
