New Country/New Voices

‘New Country, New voices’ is a performance of Rap and Street dance by a junior school class based on the reminiscences of a first generation West Indian emigrant living in the local community. The project was developed by Hertfordshire Music Service’s Street Talk rap workshop, which features rapper Robert Taylor from the internationally successful band US 3, himself a previous pupil at the school. For New Country, New Voices Dance animateur David Bedward was brought in to create a street dance to enhance the rap.

Funded by the Roots Project, the workshop ran for 4 consecutive weeks at St Andrew’s Junior school, Hitchin, and concluded with an outside performance at Hitchin’s Rhythms of the World community street festival on Saturday 11July.It provided the valuable opportunity for the children to see their culture through the eyes of another and to learn about another culture. It also enabled the school to make links with and draw living resources from the local community. An intergenerational element was also present in that the interviewee, Thelma is also mother to the rapper Robert.

The project began with BBC Radio 3 counties’ Joe Hudson Lett helping the year 5 class interview volunteer Thelma Taylor. The cultural value of the experience was evident in some of the children’s questions. .’When you first saw a telephone did you think someone was inside it?’ Similarly they were delighted by Thelma’s initial belief that all the houses in London were factories, because they had chimneys, ‘we don have no chimneys in Jamaica’.

The audio recording of the interview was then edited to produce samples from which some of the class were helped to write the rap by Robert and Music Service Rock Project Rap animateur Danny Fisher. Both the cadence and rhythms of Thelma’s speech were reflected in the rap which conveyed the children’s impressions of the main elements of her reflections. Thelma’s memories of ‘Blues’, reggae parties struck a particular note with the children and provided a memorable tag line ‘The parties were irie’.

David Bedward worked with the rest of the class to develop a vibrant street dance to enhance the rap, which had a joyous dress rehearsal before the whole school and an invited audience on the final week’s session. The main performance took place at the Rhythms of the World festival the following Saturday.

New Country, New Voices, received enthusiastic support from the school teachers, who were also interested in combining the reminiscence and the raps with literacy work. Both teachers and workshop leaders greatly enjoyed the project and gained also from exchange of respective skills. The Rock Project is currently seeking funding to develop the workshop in other schools throughout the county.