Sonia Megías, director of the Fulbright Choir, tells us about some of her other projects.
Sonia Megías collaborates with the International Institute and American Space Madrid in various activities. At the piano, she has made us spend some extraordinary times musically accompanying the projection of films such as “El maquinista de La General” or “El hombre volar”. She also directs the “Fulbright Choir”, which meets every week in the Institute's auditorium to sing songs from all over the world.
Sonia has dedicated the month of May to a project in El Salvador that we have found very interesting and we have asked her to tell her story.
CAPACITIES AND OTHER HUMAN TALENTS
Sonia Megias. June 2015 – www.soniamegias.es
I am Sonia Megías, director of the Fulbright Choir, pianist of the wonderful silent films that our International Institute programs. Composer, founder of the art publisher EdicionesDelantal.
My past month of May has been full of learning. I have remembered, above all, the richness of difference.
The only thing that some humans have in common with others is that we have pairs of arms, legs, eyes, vocal cords, holes in the nose, cerebral hemispheres, eardrums, atria and ventricles, lungs, feet and hands... And a soul, yes, each one with a soul that has something to contribute to this world.
The experience of relationships, together with the memory of past lives and our genetic load conditions us to be capable of one or another action.
I spent a month in El Salvador, a small country in Central America. There, as in any other place, people are born with a pure gaze and a desire to play. This game can lead them, as in all other places, to awareness or, on the contrary, divert their path towards the most ruthless cruelty and non-empathy with the rest of terrestrial beings.
El Salvador has several languages: Nahuat-Pipil (main language, with which I had the luxury of working there), Lenca, Quiche Maya, other forms of native expression, and finally, the languages that came from the other side of the ocean. : Castilian and English, which broke out around the year 1500 AD. C. Likewise, monotheistic religions and firearms would be exported from Europe, which unfortunately are still there.”
I arrived there with the Spanish Cooperation, to work for the National System of Youth Choirs and Orchestras in my work on 'Research and recovery of the Nahuat-Pipil language through music'. To do this, several recordings of indigenous people, and a lot of orchestration and rehearsal work, to prepare the final, tremendous concert, 'Las Voces de los Pueblos: sample of a month of work with the Spanish teacher Sonia Megías', the posters said. In this one, I directed three choirs, and an orchestra. On my visit there in 2012, I conducted a final concert with seven choirs and three orchestras, but now the System had declined, like everything else.
In my heart I don't bring the honors, I bring the looks, the smiles, the seeds of love that unstoppably push up and down. I bring with me having worked with beautiful people who live every day in fear of being murdered, raped, or murdered or raped by their children.
I arrive in Spain and, without enjoying the 8 hours of jetlag, I embark on a similar project: the A DIFFERENT LOOK Festival, organized by the National Dramatic Center at its headquarters: the Valle-Inclán Theater. Setting foot on Spanish soil, I wake up in a dreamlike place, with black walls and large windows, in which people with different capacities share with me, once again, curious looks and complicit smiles. The festival workshop, in which once again I had to plant the seed of music as a tool for raising awareness, was as revealing as the visit to El Salvador. Again, all the senses to the flower of creeps.
The people with whom I worked in the workshop, luckily, were not different from me for having been raped by 22 men on the same day… But they were also varied and had interesting experiences behind their backs, just like in El Salvador. For some of them, the legs did not respond as society supposes, for others, the eyes, for others, some of the regions of the brain, for others, stage fright could, others were bisexual, some even hetero. The work was intense, emotional and very floating.
With the people of Spain and with those of El Salvador, I learned that humans are here to take care of each other. I learned that the great evil of today's society is apathy. I learned that singing heals, that playing heals, that expressing oneself heals.
From this article, I thank the people who accompanied me on this great trip in the month of May. People of colors, of shapes, of all different perspectives and who helped me to know who I am.
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Sonia Megías (Almansa, Albacete, 1982) is a composer. She has been through different residences of European and American artists, having received, among others, the Fulbright scholarship between 2010 and 2012.
His work has been supported by different institutions such as the Doce Notas magazine (since 2006), the Gruñidos Salvajes Cultural Association (since 2005), the Phill Niblock Intermediate Experimental Foundation (New York, since 2008), the INAEM (2008 and commissions from 2009, 2011 and 2015), the Pauline Oliveros Deep Listening Institute (Kingston, since 2011), the Cervantes Institute in New York (2011-12), the United Nations (2011), the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (El Salvador, 2012 and 2015), the Kathmandu Jazz Conservatory (Nepal, 2013) or the International Institute in Spain (Madrid, 2015).
He has formed the performance group or vocal laboratory "CoroDelantal", with which he gives life to many of his investigations about ancestral rituals, psychoacoustics, vocal experimentation or listening. Likewise, he coordinates the singing meetings by barter “Giving Voices”. With the year 2015 he started the Fulbright Choir, still in the birth phase.
Through his "Creative Score Workshops" he tries to spread his passion for the world of editing and creative notations, in which the world of listening, performance, staging, gesture and many etc. melt into plastic materials and not just paper and ink.
