Soundwalks 2024 – 2025
New Works Calgary
Deadline to apply: August 15, 2024
Compensation: $250
We’re looking for thoughtful, placemaking artists from all disciplines to lead engaging and informative outdoor soundwalks in Calgary through our 2024 – 2025 presenting season. We want to hear your project ideas!!
What is a soundwalk?
… any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment. It is exposing our ears to every sound around us no matter where we are. (Hildegard Westerkamp, World Forum of Acoustic Ecology)
A soundwalk is a form of active participation in the soundscape. Though the variations are many, the essential purpose of a soundwalk is to encourage the participant to listen discriminately and moreover, to make a critical judgement about the sounds heard and their contribution to the balance or imbalance of the sonic environment.
Our soundwalk series has run regularly since 2021. This year, we want to develop a deeper engagement with a single place over the course of the year. We invite you to plan a walk for anywhere in Bowness Park. This could include Woods Homes Douglas Fir Forest, a specific edge of the lagoon, or anywhere else you think might provide an interesting auditory experience.
Please write to us with your ideas for a walk! The basic guidelines are that it must be a one-hour walk, featuring a route that you have walked (and timed) in advance of guiding others. The walk should emphasize the sounds of a place, but you can interpret this however you’d like. We aim to make our walks as physically accessible as possible; please consider how you might choose a route that could be travelled by persons using canes, walkers, or wheelchairs. We are also very happy to offer you support in designing your walk – please reach out if you think you have an idea, but you aren’t sure how to develop it.
We’ll be choosing eight soundwalk facilitators for our 2024 – 25 season. Walks will take place on Sunday afternoons (2pm on the last Sunday of the month, September through April). When applying, please let us know what month you’d prefer.
Compensation is $250 to facilitate a walk.
To apply, send your name, contact information, artistic discipline, preferred month, and walk idea or outline to rebecca bruton, artisticdirector@newworkscalgary.com.
We especially encourage womxn, LGBTQIA+, and BIPOC artists to apply!
Deadline for 2024 – 25 Applications is August 15, 2024.
We will be reviewing applications on an ongoing basis for future soundwalking series. Please don’t be shy to tell us who you are and what you do, even after this deadline has passed!
