While the air is thick with illusion we’ll cut it with a ceilidh and let song, tune and story fill our air for a while. Sundays at seven.
Mairi Campbell hosts a weekly zoom global gathering of songs, tunes, poems and offerings from friends, fans and family. Every Sunday during lockdown. Welcome to Campbell’s Ceilidh.
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The Zoom setup, due to delay doesn’t allow for conversation style chat for large numbers, which a ceilidh of course is full of, so I’ve come up with a plan to do a mix of turns of music, poems and tunes and ‘breakout rooms’ for chat. How it works: There are ‘turns’ and ‘chat rooms’ Turns are offerings of 3 minutes from participants who offer to sing or tell a story or poem, any creative offering. I curate the programme and sing and play a song or two as well. Breakout/chat rooms are a Zoom feature. As is the way with a ceilidh, it’s a chance to share some news and have a wee chat so this is a zoom friendly version. I’ll facilitate breakout room forms. This is how they go: you take turns to talk about something familiar that I’ll suggest – like, what form of exercise are you taking and how’s it going? Or, what quarantine tasks are you doing (something that you’d not normally get round to doing), or, what book are you reading, or describe the view from a window in your home, or….shoes. These are examples. Each breakout is a different topic. Going in alphabetical order the participants talks on this topic for 1.5 minutes and then the next person shares and you go round like that. Doing my head in Online is not easy on the attention. It’s hard not to get wired into the screen and end up feeling overwhelm and headachy. We need to experiment with this for ourselves. A friend today showed me that I could hide my self image on the screen and that helped. There will be an interval of 15 mins when you’ll be in breakout room of 7 or so folks where you can chat and get a refreshment etc.. We aim to be as transparent as possible and become friends with technology and each other. The technical host of the night is Zooby. Zooby’s voice is sublime and absolutely nothing can go wrong with him at the helm. He’ll put us in breakout rooms and calm our nerves if frayed. Don’t feel you need to stay for the whole event – drop in and out when you need. Get a good sound from your zoom meeting: important settings info for you. Waving hands is zoom speak for clapping. It is a bit weird not to get some audio response so we did unmute after the turns last time…but maybe we’ll evolve into wavy clapping – we should definitely try it. This event is free if you need it to be and donations are gratefully received. It’s a zoom affair with Zooby at the technical helm, so worry not! Sign up and sign in on Sunday at Seven. x
