Stefanovski at Radionica: a guitar handed to people with Down syndrome
Vlatko Stefanovski's concert at the Workshop of Integration this Friday evening, part of the Little Music Season, is an event where the Macedonian virtuoso appears for the first time in his career not as a solo performer but as a participant in a workshop with people with disabilities.
Twenty years ago, when Vlatko Stefanovski worked in Skopje with Vlada Divljan on the album Bridges, intended to be a musical bridge between Belgrade and Skopje at a moment when politics between Serbia and Macedonia was not working as one, a recognisable pattern had already formed. Stefanovski, the Macedonian guitarist whose solo body of work counts among the five most important guitar oeuvres of Eastern European rock, has consistently built his career as a series of collaborations rather than as a solo monolith. The Little Music Season of the Workshop of Integration, to which he comes this Friday, is a natural continuation of that logic, but with new partners.
The Workshop of Integration is a Belgrade organisation founded in 2003 that does music-therapy work with people with Down syndrome, autism, hearing impairment and cognitive disabilities. Their Little Music Season is a series of concerts in which well-known performers, including in past years Bora Dugic, Ana Sofrenovic and Vasil Hadzimanov, take part in joint performances with the workshop’s participants. Stefanovski is announced for Friday as a guest who will perform six songs with the Workshop’s ensemble, including Yellow Colours, Water and Polyphony, all from his solo work and his collaborations with Vlada Divljan.
What an inclusive concert means in the Belgrade context
In Serbian cultural policy, inclusion is a topic that is nominally recognised but institutionally translated into relatively small projects that are not part of the main calendar of large cultural institutions. The Belgrade Philharmonic, the National Theatre and the Sava Centre each have one or two inclusive events a year in their programmes, most often in the form of open days or children’s workshops. The Workshop of Integration’s Little Music Season is a different format, because it assumes that people with disabilities are not merely the audience but the performers, an inverted institutional relationship and as such a rarity on our cultural scene.
Stefanovski explained in one of the few interviews he gave ahead of this concert (for Kurir, two days ago) that the idea came to him two years ago, when the Workshop’s director Vesna Petrovic invited him to play a solo set for the parents of participants at the organisation’s open day. On that occasion he met a dozen young people musically trained at the Workshop who, as he says, “showed me an approach to rhythm different from what I am used to, but no less rigorous”. The next step was to make a concert in which those participants would be part of the ensemble, not just the audience.
From a musicological side, the inclusive format here is not pure therapeutic form. The Workshop’s participants who will play alongside Stefanovski have over the past several years gone through a structured musical curriculum that includes percussion instruments, vocal technique and rhythmic analysis. Stefanovski in one of the songs with them plans a version of Polyphony in which his guitar line will be broken into three rhythmic parts led by three participants. That is not a concession to simplification but a composition adapted to the ensemble.
The concert takes place in the hall of the Workshop of Integration at 28 Vase Pelagica Street, starting at 8 p.m. The hall has a capacity of around one hundred and fifty seats and, according to the organisation, tickets sold out on the first day of sales, unusual for a Belgrade inclusive format until a few years ago. For those who did not manage to get a ticket, a recording of the concert is announced to be broadcast in the Sunday slot of Radio Belgrade 2, along with a video to be released on the Workshop’s YouTube channel. Stefanovski arrives in Belgrade from Skopje on Tuesday and stays until Sunday, during which time he will have four rehearsal sessions with the ensemble. That is unusually much time for a single concert by his solo-working standards, but, as he says, “no two performances are the same, no two audiences are the same, this is not a performance but a meeting”.
