The Ground Floor Choir has a wide open-door policy. 

This piece about the Ground Floor Choir, a radically inclusive community choir originally aired on CBC's Now or Never. 

Choir Credits:
The Jumblies Theatre Ground Floor Choir 
In partnership with Making Room Community Arts and MABELLEarts
Choir Director: Shifra Cooper
Accompaniest: Emilyn Stam 

Music featured in this piece:
Here's To You
Composed by: Daev Clysdale 
Lyrics: Text from community choir members

Dinner Party
Composed by: Keith McNair
Lyrics: Inspired by an interview with Celeste, Minai and Cheri, conducted by Liz Rucker
Performed by the Jumblies Theatre Ground Floor Choir in partnership with Making Room Community Arts and MABELLEarts. Directed by Shifra Cooper with accompaniment from Emilyn Stam.

Soup Round: Ingredients
Composed by: Alex Eddington
Lyrics: Inspired by an interview with Marianne Alas, conducted by Liz Rucker and Keith McNair

Bag of Rocks

After studying interrogation transcripts from Guantánamo Bay, Jordan Scott, a poet who stutters, grew interested in how detainees' stutters were interpreted as signs of dishonesty. 
Scott applied to tour the prison to interview interrogators, but was declined. 
With Guantánamo's censorship policies in mind, Scott changed tactics, asking to record ambient sound at the prison.
This piece considers how institutional silence can be documented, and listening in spaces of trauma. It features Scott's field recordings from his prison media tour and a night visit he took to Camp X-Ray - now the site of an active war crimes investigation. 


Commissioned by Falling Tree Productions for BBC’s podcast Short Cuts (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09v3fdp)

Full Transcript available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10nDXo1VkAeUJb3it727nDZ-lTNT0_yJo/view?usp=sharing

Ambient, Sir

This piece was produced by Aliya Pabani, Allie Graham, Jess Shane and Jesse Perlstein (Team 'The Radio Mommies') as part of The 24-Hour Radio Race from KCRW's Independent Producer Project. 

Featuring Kirsten Dahlin Nolan @Howtoloveabeast

KCRW Radio Race 2018: Through Windows

From exercising to the drugs we take, ritual helps us organize and make meaning of the moments in our lives.

Rit Bits

I’ve noticed a mounting trend in both web content and documentary, whereby makers contextualize their traumatic experiences in terms of traditional narrative arcs, emphasizing suspense, climax, and resolution. Often, this results in the positioning and commodification of ‘story’ as trauma, with no mention of the systems and power structures that enabled it to occur. While I believe that sharing details of trauma is valuable and important, retelling them in broadcast environments or on entertainment platforms is different from recounting them to a loved one or a therapist.

For this piece, I explored the resonance of stories told in this way by assembling segments of confessional YouTube videos so as to emphasize the disconnect between people relaying their trauma with sincerity, while simultaneously using devices of suspense and release to entice listeners to lean in closer.

Thanks to Phoebe Wang for editorial support.

The Juicy Part

My first radio documentary was a non-narrated piece that followed a gymnast in the wake of quitting her sport due to injury. When it aired, I sent it to my subject, Nicola, a then 16-year-old. Nicola listened, then told me she hated it. This has haunted my documentary practice ever since.
Nicola, Talkback is a piece about what it means to be in, and to tell, someone else's story. It's based around a conversation between Nicola and I about the process of making the original documentary, and features outtakes from the original doc.


Nicola, Talkback was commissioned and produced for BBC Short Cuts with editor Andrea Rangecroft, and oversight from Nicola. It features music by Abby Swidler. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000gtn9

You can listen to the original documentary this piece speaks about here: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/docproject/i-was-a-gymnast-and-then-i-wasn-t-saying-goodbye-to-your-dream-at-16-1.3992878

Nicola Talkback

An audio drawing lesson with Ebony Flowers

Ebony Flowers is a cartoonist, ethnographer, and educator who teaches drawing to people who stopped drawing a long time ago, or who think they can't draw. This piece is designed so that you can follow along and draw with her, either on paper or in your mind. https://www.ebonydrawsflowers.com/ 

Music by Chad Crouch and Abby Swidler.

Self Portrait in Outer Space - with Ebony Flowers

We generally think about dance as being something you go and see, but iele paloumpis and their collaborators have developed an approach to audio description for dance that goes way beyond the verbal version of the visual that is traditional for AD for live performance. 

This piece interrogates how a holistic approach to AD can transform the audience experience for everyone, and how access can be artform in and of itself. 


Produced by Jess Shane in collaboration with iele paloumpis, Seta Morton, Krishna Washburn, and Alejandra Ospina. 
Music for this piece was composed by Dan Pencer. 

This piece first aired on BBC Short Cuts in their episode The Interpreter. Listen here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000pfgd

***
This research exploring audio description for dance improvisation was catalyzed by the evening-length dance performance of In place of catastrophe, a clear night sky, which was set to premiere at Danspace Project in May 2020, but has been postponed due to COVID-19. It was directed by iele paloumpis in collaboration with Marielys Burgos-Meléndez, Seta Morton, Alejandra Ospina, Monica Rodriguez, Ogemdi Ude, Krishna Washburn, Adrien Weibgen and Marýa Wethers. For more information, please visit inplaceofcatastrophe.com

This project is made possible, in part, by the Danspace Project Commissioning Initiative and Production Residency Program funded by the Lambent Foundation Fund of the Tides Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; with additional support through a 2019 Movement Research Residency, funded by the Scherman Foundation’s Katharine S. and Axel G. Rosin Fund; and is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC); as well as Dance/NYC's Disability. Dance. Artistry. Dance and Social Justice Fellowship Program, made possible by the generous support of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs CreateNYC Disability Forward Fund and the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, and with additional support from the New York Community Trust. Creative developmental residencies at The Chocolate Factory Theater, Queer|Art Pride at Abrons Arts Center, AUNTS Residency at Mount Tremper Arts, and the Zil Culture Center in Moscow through the GPS/Global Practice Sharing program of Movement Research with funding from the Trust for Mutual Understanding, have also contributed to this ongoing research.

***

Image Description: Performer, Krishna Washburn, dances in Saint Mark's Church during a 2019 rehearsal of iele paloumpis's "In place of catastrophe, a clear night sky". Krishna's back is to the camera, her long black braid drapes down her back. Her arms are extended wide, with fingertips curving upward to create a bowl-like shape, conveying something akin to victory, presentation, pride or praise. A balcony, arched windows and ornate columns can be seen in the background.    Photo Credit for "Krishna at St Marks": Izzy Devine-Carter

What is this shape?

More work / more recent work on my website ~~ www.jessshane.com
Co-creator of Constellations Audio www.constellationsaudio.com

Jess Shane

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