Teaching artist, musician and writer
Projects
The Nest - A Music For All Project by Connecting the Dots in Music
"In 2021, Connecting the Dots in Music was supported by Arts SA to commission a brand new story book and score to provide a creative framework for future Music For All Projects. The Nest was developed by a team of South Australian creatives: Finegan Kruckemeyer (author), Karen De Nardi (illustrator), Rachel Bruerville (composer), Thea Martin (lead Teaching Artist/Producer, Emily Gann (project director/producer), Hilary Kleinig (co-producer), and with major support and input from specialist music teachers Lily Gower and Lucy Standish. The Nest premiered in 2022, brought to life by 50 students from SA School for Vision Impaired and Kilparrin Teaching and Assessment School and Services. Supported by Carclew, a team of emerging teaching artists collaborated with students across a weeklong program of creative workshops. The project had universal design principles and accessibility at its core." - from Connecting the Dots in Music.
Listening Workshop - Co-facilitated with Lily Potger (2022)
Working with a group of 20 young creatives, dancers, musicians and artists, Lily and Thea guided participants through an exploration of listening as more than an ear-centric act. Participants performed and interpreted text scores by Pauline Oliveros (Tuning Meditation) and James Tenney (Swell Piece) - arranged for voice and movement, and for phones respectively.
Young Adelaide Voices Workshop - Co-facilitated with Kat Ogierman (2022)
Based on the education resource Kat and Thea co-wrote for Kobi Yamada's book What Do You Do With An Idea?, choir members explored listening and movement through the perspectives of both time and space, to develop short movement and drama pieces inspired by 'a place that is safe to dream'.
A Room of Her Own - A Creativity Workshop in Sound (Piloted October 2021)
Exploring the importance of developing mental and physical spaces for creativity is the foundation of this collaborative composition project. Together, 22 high school age musicians explored what it means to create with sound, connecting into a series of works in music and literature, with a primary focus on Adelaide composer, Anne Cawrse’s 2020 work for string quartet, A Room of Her Own and the inspiration for the composition, Virginia Woolf’s seminal essay A Room of One’s Own. Participants collaborated on their own compositions, working with creative tools and compositional ideas explored in Cawrse’s music and Woolf’s essay, with a particular focus on what it means to quote, share and borrow ideas when working in a dialogic artistic space. The student musicians and teaching artists navigated together what it means to be part of an entwined story; continuing, reimagining and developing a creative tradition, as well as the essential nature of providing accessible spaces for all, to support free connection with our own innate creativity.
Oct 4, 9am – 4pm | Workshop at Glenunga International High School
Oct 5, 7:30 – 8:30pm | Concert at Payinthi, 128 Prospect Road
A Room of Her Own - A Creativity Workshop in Sound
Video by Kirrily Snape
Collaboration with Miriam Sims - Process Song (2021)
"Processes Song, a suspended image is a process bound image beginning as a gesture in the hot shop, becoming a graphic score archived in light through cyanotype and immortalised in galvanised steel. The accompanying sonic response was devised by Miriam’s collaborator Thea Martin on Violin. The score was developed as an exercise in exploring the performative traces and improvisations of glassmaking in comparison to sound. Glass string’s materiality into recording light and archiving gesture revealed itself through several turns of image-making."
Excerpt by Miriam Sims from MMXXI Grad Show.
Scoring in Text - A Creativity Workshop in Sound (2021)
A workshop in public space designed for young adults to engage in sound making regardless of their own artistic practice or experience in sound. The workshop was open invite, facilitated by Thea Martin with documentation support/artistic collaboration from Miriam Sims. Participants were be invited to engage with a variety of text scores/sonic meditations by composers Pauline Oliveros, Daniel Goode and Thea Martin, through meditative listening, sound imagining, vocalisation, dialogue, walking and writing.
See Scores for more information.