Art, media, music and performance are the fields that bring me the most joy and I have sought involvement in them throughout my life. I am geared towards managing people and events; my experience as a performer, musician and artist lends me an understanding of the crafts that informs my organizational capacities. I enjoy facilitating for others, and with my event-planning experience specific to adapting live music to an online format, Suoni Per Il Popolo and I were a great match. The festival had decades of programming under its belt, and I was impressed by their commitment to diversity in the entertainment industry. I was excited by the possibility of working with an international array of queer artists, artists of color, and First Nations musicians. I seek to work in media that is meaningful and understand how entertainment can extend into social work and activism.
As an intern, my responsibilities evolved along with the festival. In May, I started with promotion. Performances would run for the first three weeks of June, with two to four shows streamed online through Vimeo, Facebook, and YouTube per night. This meant there were over 65 performances to organize, film, edit, promote, introduce and stream for the festival. Being highly organized with social media content was one strategy to make sure there was awareness about the many exciting performances to look forward to in June. Following a promotional calendar, I researched each artist and found interviews, articles, videos, and supplementary media that could be used to specifically promote them and their show date.
Later in May, I started working with MUTEK Montreal, a well-established electronic music festival, who co-presented four of Suoni’s artists this year. I gathered assets for those artists and packaged them for the MUTEK team, who in turn sent me logos and material to use in Suoni’s social media posts and newsletters. Every week, I sent a newsletter to a mailing list of over 4,000 people in which I reiterated the batch of artists who had been announced that week. Thanks to the Suoni team’s massive Excel spreadsheet containing information about each artist, generating these newsletters was a matter of downloading files, copying links, and reformatting. The Excel sheet was useful as well for my role in the completion of the new website for this festival. I was tasked with entering information about each artist and event into the website’s backend before it went live in the third week of May. At times it was challenging because the whole team was struggling to adapt to the new format and there were occasionally holes of information in the sheet. Luckily, everyone at Suoni is incredibly friendly and I felt comfortable contacting various members of the team if I was stuck. I also was working with Exclaim! Canada, and the Wire, which is a British music magazine, to promote the festival.
After a month of promotion, my duties shifted: a new spreadsheet was created to determine who could act as moderator for each night of the festival. Moderator duties involved working the chat for the shows across three platforms, Facebook, Vimeo and YouTube. This meant compiling a script specific to the night, to provide viewers with information on who was performing, what they were about, how long the show is and what was coming next, as well as answering questions and encouraging engagement. I worked on 27 nights of the festival. Many shows featured an interview after the performance, where I would communicate questions from the audience to the interviewer. This experience was time-consuming, as it required more than three hours of active screentime, and when I returned to the West Coast, the time difference could be jarring. However, it was definitely a highlight of the experience as I got to participate and feel immersed in the events. Even though they were videos, it was rewarding to see the performances from artists I had researched, emailed with, and promoted in the weeks before.
I did not receive academic credit for this internship, but thoroughly enjoyed my summer working for Suoni. I have a great appreciation for the team there and the work they do to bring performances from all over the world to a shared “stage.”
