Parkville Picnic
E-Orchestra

Residency, Workshop and Performance, 11-22  September 2023
MPavilion Parkville, The University of Melbourne

Over two weeks of workshops Gail Priest brought together University of Melbourne students interested in electronic composition to form the Parkville Picnic E-Orchestra. Together they worked on  compositions inspired by the site and research into the history of bandstands as places of social cohesion and leisure developed as an antidote to increasing industrialisation in the 19th century. It could be argued that we are at a comparable crisis point in the early 21st century, as our mobile digital devices encourage insulation, isolation, and interior lifestyles. The Parkville Picnic E-Orchestra used the very technology that drives this situation to create a playful event that attempts to brings people back together in social space.

Each performer created a short pieice that was performed out on the green (through bluetooth speakers), that audience could wander around and sample.

You can hear some of these works here on  Parkville Picnic E-Orchestra SoundCloud

 We then they gathered together in the Parkville MPavilion to perform the graphic schore Manufacturing Pleasures.    

Participants:  Han Bi Zhao, Shixin Wang, Connie Wan, Robert Jeffrey, April Guest, Martha Audrey

Technical Staff: Maree Prokos & Nicho Rossi

 This project was supported by The University of Melbourne