Girls Rock Camp
When Rock and Roll Camp for Girls ( German rock -Sommerlager for girls ), a summer camp for girls called and young women, in which the participants discover their artistic and technical skills as musicians and are able to form. The term rock does not only refer to rock music in the narrower sense, but also includes other musical forms of youth culture such as heavy metal or hip-hop . The first Girls Rock Camp took place in Portland (Oregon) in 2001 and has since spread to more than 30 locations and sponsoring organizations worldwide. Girls Rock Camps have also existed in Europe since 2003 . The Girls Rock Camp movement is organized in the Girls Rock Camp Alliance (GRCA).
The concept of the Girls Rock Camp comes from the Riot-Grrrl-Movement and has a feminist background with the restriction to female participants : Girls and women should go beyond the mass media ascriptions that only assign them the stereotypical roles of singers, groupies or fans in rock music to find their own approach to rock and pop. In diametrical contrast to casting shows like Pop Idol and its national clones like DSDS , the goal is girls rock! Movement not the production of “stars” adapted to the market, but the empowerment of the participants and their participation in rock and pop music as actors and producers - under conditions of their own choosing .
history
The "Rock 'n' Roll Camp For Girls" in Portland - origin and pioneer (2000-2010)
The riot grrrl movement arose in the 1990s on the American west coast, primarily in Olympia , Washington. The first feminist music festival Ladyfest took place there in August 2000 , the aim of which was to increase the participation of women and girls in the music scene, where they are still underrepresented. Inspired by this, the student Misty McElroy began preparations in 2000 for the first girls rock camp in Portland , Oregon. McElroy had worked as a roadie for six years prior to graduation and was frustrated by sexism in the rock business. The project should be the thesis of her master’s degree at Portland State University .
The first Portland Rock 'n' Roll Camp For Girls (RnRC4G) took place on the Portland State University campus in Portland in August 2001.
In the summer of 2007, three camps were held in Portland, with a total of 250 girls participating. The organization took over the existing indie label 16 Records including distribution channels and continued the work with volunteers. Sound carriers from camp projects and musicians who are friends with the project are released on 16 records . That same year, the documentary Girls Rock! Shot about the camp, which came out in theaters in early 2008, and helped spread the word about the idea. Another step towards practical dissemination was the book Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls by Marisa Anderson, who had worked at the Portland Rock Camp for years. In 2008, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's foundation supported the camp with USD 40,000 to finance the establishment of a recording studio .
Spread of rock camps and founding of the GRCA (2003–2007)
Rock camps for girls have existed in Sweden under the name Popkollo since 2003. Pop stands for pop culture . Kollo is Swedish for camp and refers to the reform tradition of summer camps for young people from the city that has existed in Sweden since the beginning of the 20th century. In January 2003, the Swedish pop singer Marit Bergman sent a request to the Rockparty association , which organized the Hultsfred music festival , which in the sentence Var är alla tjejerna? ("Where are all the girls?") Culminated. Bergman had toured throughout the summer of 2002 , remaining the only woman in the line-up at many festivals . A special collo for girls should help to alleviate this imbalance. The rock party employee Åsa Johnsen responded positively and looked for a way to finance and organize. Finally, there was a grant from the EU LEADER program , which promotes innovative actions in rural areas. The first pop collo took place in August 2003 in isolated Hultsfred with 19 participants over ten days. Shortly afterwards, the Sheena Music Association was founded, which also received LEADER funding. Sheena has been the sponsoring association of the Popkollo event in Hultsfred since then, and has been renamed Föreningen Popkollo Hultsfred . The first camp in 2003 generated national interest in Sweden, so that in 2005 the second camp was set up in Umeå . From 2006 to 2009, Hultsfred and Umeå were joined by pop collo camps in Gothenburg , Malmö , Stockholm , Katrineholm and Karlshamn , so that the camps now take place in seven locations every summer. The national Popkollo Association (Riks Organizations Popkollo) acts as the umbrella organization for the seven local sponsoring associations. In addition to the original focus on pop / rock, there are now also special camps for the music genres metal , electro and hip-hop / R'n'B . While the Popkollo was founded independently from Portland in 2003, the idea of the Ladies Rock Camp was adopted from the USA in 2009 . Popkollo is financed one third by participation fees, one third by grants and sponsorship money and one third by volunteer work.
The Institute for the Musical Arts (IMA) was founded in 1986 by June Millington and Ann Hackler in Northern California with a mission to empower women and girls in the music business. In 2001 the company moved to a farm near Northampton in West Massachusetts , which was acquired for this purpose and which, in addition to accommodation in a converted barn with recording studios, also enables concerts with up to 200 spectators. In 2003 the IMA hosted the first rock summer camp for girls. Hackler and her partner Millington (* 1948) belong to an older generation of feminism than the Riot Grrrls , and later did not join the Girls Rock Camp Alliance .
Women who had worked as supervisors at the original rock camp in Portland transported the idea further: In 2002, Kelley Anderson, who studied sound engineering at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) and was politically active as a feminist, taught at the camp in Portland courses for electric guitar. In 2003, the Southern Girls Rock & Roll Camp , which she founded, held a summer camp for the first time at the June Anderson Women's Center of the MTSU in Murfreesboro , TN.
Ingfrid Hu Dahl, who had also worked as a supervisor in Portland for one summer, founded a. a. with Karla Schickele from the indie band Ida and other women in New York the Willie Mae Rock Camp For Girls , which first took place in Brooklyn in 2005 . The camp is named after the blues singer Willie Mae Thornton . The pop-punk band Care Bears on Fire , whose founding can be traced back to the Girl Rock Camps , also comes from New York . The band was founded in 2004 by the then nine to ten year old girls Sophie Kasakove, Jenna Westmoreland and Izzy Schappell-Spillman after Izzy had attended a rock camp in Portland. Care Bears on Fire released two LPs and two EPs on indie labels from 2006 to 2011 , and they continue to play at New York's Willie Mae Rock Camp .
The founding conference of the Girls Rock Camp Alliance (GRCA) took place in Portland in February 2007. Representatives of seven rock camp initiatives met for a conference to exchange experiences in the organization of Girls Rock Camps and to form an international alliance. The founding members were the rock camp sponsoring associations and activist groups from Portland , OR (Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls) , Philadelphia (Girls Rock Philly) , Brooklyn , NY (Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls) , Sweden (Popkollo) , Tennessee (Southern Girls Rock & Roll Camp) , London (Girls Rock! UK) and Oakland , CA (Bay Area Girls Rock Camp) .
Further expansion and internationalization (since 2007)
In 2007, the first Girls Rock Camp took place in Minneapolis . In 2008 the first Bay Area Girls Rock Camp took place in Oakland , California . The organizers, who are among the seven founding clubs of the GRCA, had previously volunteered at the Portland camp for several years. In 2009, Montreal and Vancouver followed in Canada and Seattle in the USA .
The first Girls Rock Camp in German-speaking countries was founded in 2008 by the Swedish musician Ellinor Blixt, who moved to Berlin , together with several women from Germany. Blixt had experience with pop collo in Sweden . The first Ruby Tuesday Camp took place in Cottbus in August 2009 with the support of the Music Education Department of the Lausitz University of Applied Sciences . The camp and the sponsoring association are named after Linda Keith alias Ruby Tuesday , who is sung about in the Rolling Stones song of the same name as a woman who does not correspond to the role cliché of the groupie. Most of the supervisors were musically socialized in the 1990s, while Susie Asado and Kat Frankie took part in more well-known musicians in 2009 , both of whom also taught in 2010. In 2010 Peaches also took part.
In 2010 the first Girls Rock Camp in Austria took place in Graz . In 2011 a new attempt was made in London with the Rock Camp for Girls London .
Procedure and organization
The age limits for participants in Girls Rock Camps differ from camp to camp, mostly the age group between 12 and 17 years is addressed. Some camps also accept girls from the age of eight. Experience with an instrument is not a prerequisite for participation: it would be unrealistic for 12-year-old girls to have mastered the electric guitar , bass or drums . In addition, such a claim would not correspond to the DIY aesthetic of punk , in which more emphasis is placed on authentic expression using simple means (“three chords”) than on perfect mastery of the instrument. In contrast to the image of rock and punk, the underage participants are not allowed to consume alcohol, nicotine or drugs. At many camps, this restriction also applies to adult supervisors.
The duration of the camp varies between three days and a week, with a maximum of ten days. At the beginning of the Girls Rock Camp , girls come together to form bands if they don't come as a group. The daily routine usually consists of a part of supervised exercises on instruments or technology and a part of supervised band exercises. Workshops and discussions on specific topics for all participants can be interspersed therein; the evening is free for leisure or jamming . On the last day of a Girls Rock Camp there is usually a public final concert with the bands of the participants. Also demos can often be included.
Some sponsoring associations offer similarly designed summer camps for adult women, mostly under the title Ladies Rock Camp . These camps are usually set up over a long weekend and contribute to cross-financing the offers for girls through higher participation fees. Some sponsoring associations have a year-round infrastructure of rooms, instruments and recording studios, be it in their own possession as in Portland or through joint use agreements with universities or music schools as in Tennessee. These clubs also offer offers without overnight stays and outside of the holidays, about once a week afternoon programs for schoolgirls, called Portland Rock Camp Studio .
Girls Rock Camps are almost without exception prepared and supervised by adult volunteers . Common positions include group supervisor, band coach, instrument teacher, production manager and workshop leader, for example for song writing or self-defense . In the interest of reversing the usual gender roles in rock music, these leadership and teaching positions are reserved for female volunteers as role models . Other positions in technology, kitchen and driving service are also open to men. A combination of a summer camp with accommodation, food and full-time service with the specialized and technology-consuming music lessons is a great need for volunteers results: child ratio of one and a half to two supervisors sites per participating girls are common, though some teaching tasks in block workshops done become.
Almost all Girls Rock Camps were initially initiated by a few women, whose association was not explicitly regulated by company law in the early preparatory phase of the first camp. The necessity of taking out liability insurance , rental contracts and care agreements with the parents of the participants, as well as opening accounts, made it necessary to set up a non-profit organization before the first camp . So that sponsors can deduct their donations for tax purposes, these are tax-privileged 501 (c) organizations in the USA without exception , and correspondingly registered associations in Germany . (eV) The sponsoring associations finance the Girls Rock Camps through a mix of monetary and material donations, participation fees , subsidies and the sale of CDs and merchandise . Benefit concerts are common , often by bands whose female members also teach in the camp.
literature
- Marisa Anderson (Ed.): Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls: How to Start a Band, Write Songs, Record an Album, and Rock Out! Chronicle Books, San Francisco 2008, ISBN 9780811852227 .
- Katja Peglow, Jonas Engelmann (Eds.): Riot Grrrl Revisited . Ventil Verlag, Main 2011, ISBN 978-3-931555-47-4 .
Web links
- Official website of the Girls Rock Camp Alliance (GRCA)
- Girls Rock! in the Internet Movie Database (documentary about the Rock 'N' Roll Camp For Girls in Portland from 2007)
- Ruby Tuesday - Rock Camp for Girls (Germany)
- Girls Rock Camp Lower Austria (Austria)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Katia Dunn: Misty McElroy . In: The Portland Mercury, April 25, 2002.
- ↑ Jessica Valenti: Full frontal feminism . Seal Press, Emeryville 2007, ISBN 978-1-580-05201-6 , p. 16.
- ↑ a b History ( Memento of the original from June 11, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the website of the Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls , Portland.
- ↑ Grantee Detail: Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as broken. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation website. (Retrieved June 17, 2011.)
- ↑ a b History on the website of Popkollo . (Retrieved June 18, 2011.)
- ↑ European Observatory for Rural Areas (Ed.): Sheena: A Friends' Association for Music hits the right note ( memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 7.7 MB) . In: Leader + Magazine . No. 2/2005, ISSN 1830-1053 , pp. 28-29. (Based on an article by Åsa Johnsen)
- ↑ About us on the Institute for the Musical Arts website. (Accessed June 17, 2011.)
- ↑ Mina Carson, Tisa Lewis, Susan Shaw: Girls rock !: Fifty years of women making music . University Press of Kentucky, Lexington 2004, ISBN 0813123100 , p. 93.
- ↑ Barbara J. Love: Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-1975 . University of Illinois Press, Chicago 2006, ISBN 025203189X , p. 316.
- ↑ Herstory of GRRC on the website of the Southern Girls Rock & Roll Camp - SGRCC. (Retrieved June 17, 2011.)
- ^ Marian Sawer, Women's movements: flourishing or in abeyance? Routledge, London 2008, ISBN 0415462452 , pp. 155f.
- ↑ History ( Memento of the original from October 26, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. of the Willie Mae Rock Camp For Girls (Retrieved June 15, 2011.)
- ↑ Laura Sinagra: In Ethical Culture's Venerable Halls, Music Camp in Riot Grrl Tradition . In: New York Times, August 20, 2005.
- ↑ Jem Aswad: Burning Down the House . In: New York Magazine August 14, 2006.
- ↑ GRCS Conference February 2007 ( Memento of the original from December 28, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the GRCA website. (Accessed June 17)
- ↑ About us at the Minneapolis Girls Rock Retreat. (Retrieved June 15, 2011.)
- ↑ History and Community ( Memento of the original from August 17, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the Bay Area Girls Rock Camp website . (Retrieved June 17, 2011.)
- ↑ About ( Memento of the original from April 1, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. the Girls Rock Camp Montreal. (Retrieved June 15, 2011.)
- ↑ About ( Memento of the original from June 30, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Girls Rock Camp Vancouver. (Retrieved June 15, 2011.)
- ↑ Mission & Background ( Memento of the original from January 28, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the Rain City Rock Camp for Girls website . (Retrieved June 15, 2011.)
- ↑ History ( Memento of the original from May 26, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the Ruby Tuesday website. (Retrieved June 15, 2011.)
- ↑ a b Juliane Juergensohn, Anette Profus: Girls who play guitar: Girls Rock Camps as a place of self-determination . In: Katja Peglow, Jonas Engelmann (Eds.): Riot Grrrl Revisited . Main 2011, pp. 175-179.
- ^ Zoé Sona: In the third-free zone . In: Die tageszeitung from August 12, 2010.
- ↑ Dennis Sand : Don't become a groupie, but a rock star . In: Welt am Sonntag on August 13, 2010.
- ↑ History ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. of Girls Rock Camp Lower Austria. (Retrieved June 15, 2011.)
- ↑ March Break Camp 2011 ( Memento of the original from April 12, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the Rock Camp for Girls London website (Retrieved June 15, 2011.)
- ↑ Rock Camp Rules ( Memento of the original from June 12, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. of the Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls , Portland, OR. (Retrieved June 18, 2011)
- ↑ Rock Camp Studio ( Memento of the original from June 11, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at the Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls , Portland, OR. (Retrieved June 18, 2011)
- ↑ Volunteer positions at the Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls , Portland, OR. (Retrieved June 18, 2011)
