ABSTRACT
A city is a particular kind of place, perhaps best described as many worlds in one place. As modes of engagement charged with emotion and imagination, composition and sound design are valuable tools in navigating these real-life borders and facilitate the delicate and complex task of building trust with vulnerable participants. The manifestation of tensions and intimacies within the collective composition process serves as a stark reminder that social collaboration is not a ‘clean’ process, but rather a messy way of ‘being entangled with communities’. Aspiring to an ‘authentic’ representation of the participants’ ideas was central to the project. To evaluate this, the author adopted Steven Feld's process of dialogic editing to structure a workshop before the public performances. We need to embrace the good work they do as sites of social and cultural encounter; facilitating dialogues of knowledge production and sharing between participants and leaders, and participants and the wider community through the actual and intimate making of art.
