Strung Together: A Night of World Music Improvisation (San Francisco).

International Performance Project, commissioned by Diaspora Arts Connection. African American Art & Culture Complex: Burial Clay Theatre, San Francisco, US, 2017.

Drawing from models of cultural integration and collaborative creativity, this research project enabled the development of a practical methodology through which the improvisatory approaches of non-congruent music-cultures might be combined to create a programme of original, eclectic works, within a limited time frame. Considering the subtle boundaries which lie between coexistence, assimilation, and synthesis within inter-cultural collaborations, Strung Together explored how different initial musical stimuli might alter the balance, whilst maintaining contextually-relative improvisatory freedom(s); and optimising productivity. Here the blending of three distinctive improvisation-based music traditions was investigated – Persian Classical, Arabic traditional, and Western contemporary – through a process comprising: continual dialogue; collective composition; coalesced methods of improvisation; rearrangement and refinement; rehearsals; and live performance.