“The past is never dead. It’s not even past”

(from William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (1951) )

“We start believing now that we can be who we are”

(from Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, Grease (1971) )

Building out from last year’s PGVIS Opening Locks presentation and inspired by this year’s Traditions in Transition theme, I will seek to take forward some of the issues of student agency, genre diversity, multi-layered connectivity and power/inclusion raised last year. Over the past 12 months, my personal circumstances have involved significant change in ways I had not anticipated and in a context where musical practice globally has also been radically disrupted. Now in a different continent from where I might have then been imagining, I will explore issues of institutional, artistic and personal identity in a context where our sense of presence in the present becomes ever more complicated. How do we find ourselves and our place in a reality which involves such ever-increasing complexity and uncertainty? More specifically, what might this mean for music education when futures have never been so clearly (truthfully?) unknown?

This presentation will take as its starting point considerations which emerged from a range of  creative / performative experiences others have shared in the past twelve months. The intention will be to offer some provocations for re-imagining traditions. Having moved from Southeast Asia to Queensland, I will also seek to establish some possibilities for others to develop greater regional connection and awareness. Through these experiences, I believe more than ever that ‘now’ offers a special opportunity for cross-disciplinary opportunity, for experimental play, connecting people’s potential to be becoming collaborative makers of magic as they open up to their time(s), place(s), histories, stories and dreams.