PLAY / SING / DANCE / COSPLAY / CODE / LARP / CREATE for CREDIT with the TTU Celtic Ensemble & Elegant Savages Orchestra
The TTU Celtic Ensemble is recruiting for Spring 2023! Seeking singers, players, dancers, cosplayers, gamers, coders, LARPers, actors, and denizens of the High, Middle, and Lower Realms!
MUEN 3110 – 204 (42729) / Grad section MUEN 5110 – 204 (21252)
Open to participants from across the TTU campus
ACTIVE ALLIES to LGBTQIA, AAPI, BIPOC, women-identifying, and related minoritized communities: the TTU Celtic Ensemble & Elegant Savages Orchestra wants YOU!
Imagineering Committee to help shape the Bassanda Universe
Inclusivity Caucus to maximize engagement, rights, and respects for all people
See “The Elegant Savages Orchestra” http://elegantsavagesorchestra.com;
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elegantsavagesorchestra
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/CRmMpk9hIJ6/
The TTU Celtic Ensemble (http://ttucelticensemble.com; http://youtube.com/ttucelticensemble; Facebook: http://tinyurl.com/2ft5myw) is a “folk orchestra” of singers, players, and dancers dedicated to exploring the dance music & song of the Seven Celtic Nations (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, Galicia, and the Isle of Man), North Europe (France, Spain, Scandinavia), and related traditions. All band, orchestra, and folk instruments and voice-types welcome. Many opportunities for soloes, chamber pieces, and orchestral tuttis.
The Celtic Ensemble concertizes, tours, and participates in collaborative events throughout the academic year (dances, theatrical shows, film scores, etc). Members are encouraged to explore both primary and secondary skills (other instruments, song, dance, etc) and some traditional instruments are available for loan and learning. The CE also works closely with other Vernacular Music Center Ensembles and with partnered performance and arts organizations throughout the region.
Recent concert performance: https://youtu.be/Ez19hapEptg?t=3207
PBS television special: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHIe7EoKi8M
The Elegant Savages Orchestra: Symphonic folk from a lost world
Major inspiration for the Elegant Savages Orchestra, the “big band” version of the TTU Celtic Ensemble, comes from the fictional country of “Bassanda,” a creation of Taos-based musicians and VMC partners Chipper Thompson (chipperthompson.com) and Roger Landes (rogerlandes.com), who for purposes of our January 2014 debut assumed their Bassanda personae (“The Rev” and “The General”) as guest performers. We imagined the fictional “Elegant Savages Orchestra,” in which, as part of an “alternate-history” frame, it’s alleged that a Soviet satellite’s official state folkloric ensemble (the “Bassanda National Radio Orchestra”) mutates, after the fall of Communism, into a free-lance ensemble engaged in a Never-Ending Tour.
The BNRO/ESO has thus been heard in many permutations and with widely variegated personnel, including “The Classic 1952 Band,” “The 1962 ‘Beatnik’ Band” (which nearly appeared on the cover of Life magazine under the headline “New Currents from Behind the Iron Curtain”), “The 1965 Newport Folk Festival Band,” who helped jump-start Bob Dylan’s notorious switch from acoustic folk to electric rock & roll, “The Mysterious 1885 Victorian “Steampunk” Band, “The Post-Apocalyptic ‘Desert Pirates’ Band,” “The 1912 New Orleans Creole “Voodoo” Band,” the “1928 ‘Carnivale Incognito’ Band,” the 1934 “Intergalactic Pandemic Popular Front Band,” “The 1936 International Brigade Libertarias Band”
and, coming in Fall 2022, “The 1942 CASABLANCA Band”:
After the tragic defeat of the Republican forces and their foreign-born allies by Franco’s Nationals, the members of the 1936 International Brigade Libertad Band find themselves variously escaping and exiled from Spain, struggling to regroup in the worldwide battle against fascist militarism.
In 1937, as fascist forces tightened their sieges at Bilbao and Madrid, both Spanish Republicans and their allies in the International Brigades fought desperately to delay the inevitable defeat. Members of the BNRO had served in combat, but in the Civil War’s chaotic aftermath, escaped to Paris or to New York, and to Tangier, Martinique, and Los Angeles. In the same period, the young American playwright Murray Burnett, having witnessed Nazism first-hand in Vienna, hacked-out a play featuring a mysterious American club owner called Rick, and the woman who he loves. By 1941 Jack Warner had snapped up an option on the story, and, through a lengthy, unpredictable combination of rewrites, headlines, the studio system, and pure chance, the studio pulled together a production, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, slated to commence filming in the new year.
And then came the December 7 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor: “A day that will live in infamy.” American Isolationists were shunted aside, and the nation readied for war. Casablanca was suddenly timely, despite its unfinished script. Among the cast were numerous real-life refugees and anti-fascists, including villain Conrad Veidt and hero Paul Henreid, as well as Marcel Dalio, Peter Lorre, S.Z. Sakall, Leonid Kinskey, and Madeline Lebeau, who had escaped with Dalio just a few months before, and who bursts into real tears at the singing of “Le Marseillaise.” When production began in May 1942, there were, likewise, Bassandans among the crew—and in even more shadowy, even more crucial anti-fascist roles, which linked the film’s fictions and its participants’ real-life experiences, in a world torn by war.
Viva la democracie.
Director: Dr Christopher J Smith (http://tinyurl.com/389zgkx)
A series of short films featuring the ESO: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKXR86U6wxeWw2K0tGjmaq425te7QUCsH
Rehearsals and performances at TTU SOM (LBK campus): face-to-face, socially-distanced.
First tutti rehearsal Sunday January 15 5-7pm room M011 (“Band Hall”) in the TTU School of Music
Admission by interview/audition.
Contact Dr Smith (christopher.smith@ttu.edu) for more information.
