17 Guitar Heroines Create A One-Off Improvisational Performance

It’ll be the closing event of this year’s Leaps & Bounds Music Festival, 17 guitarists improvising — no set theme, totally unrehearsed and totally about the moment. That’s Guitarelay, and the man behind it is curator Don Rogers. 

"I really like the idea of not fully writing a song, or writing one part of a song and therefore someone else is free to write their part to it."

“I’d run Guitarelay a couple of times in the past, as part of the closing night of the Melbourne Fringe Festival 2009 to 2011,” Rogers explains, “and I’d let it go but a couple of things influenced me to take it back up again this year. I really like the idea of not fully writing a song, or writing one part of a song and therefore someone else is free to write their part to it, and so I like that sense of collaboration, of people interacting that way musically. That was one aspect, and then I’d been involved in a one-off performance of a piece of music called Arabic Numbers, and it involved a series of people having a kind of a chain reaction of overlapping in their playing. It just worked on one repetitive piece that could be just a tonal change that you’d want to work on whatever the instrument was and that’s how the piece evolved. Combining those two ideas I kind of had a sense that I could put that into my own way of thinking. I don’t really play guitar but I thought guitar’s got a really nice sonic range that allows people to flex themselves in a way that’s relevant to music that I experience.”

The nice twist in the tale is that this isn’t 17 guitar heroes but 17 guitar heroines — Penny Ikinger, Tamara Dawn from Hits, Jane Dust, Marney Macleod from Zond, Alysia Manceau, Kellie Lloyd from Screamfeeder, Mia Schoen from New Estate, Laura MacFarlane from Ninetynine, Rachael Cooke from Clag, Sarah McKenna from Tangrams, Grace Anderson, Bonnie Mercer, Andria Prudente, Claire Birchall, Lisa MacKinney from Taipan Tiger Girls, Lara Sulio from Fourteen Nights At Sea and Kim Myers from Fur — playing whatever and for as long as they like, weaving in and out of each other’s responses.

“I haven’t really pitched it along those lines,” Rogers admits, “but it’s certainly the case, and that was certainly my intent. I kind of wanted to see if I could do that for a start, to see if I could find the 17 people committed and there are a couple more who may be available on the day. I’d seen a couple of things recently where there were small groups of just men doing these sort of thing and I found it a bit… not right,” he chuckles.

“And I think pretty much every one of these guitarists is key to the bands that they play in. It’s not a perfunctory role; their sound is key to what they’re doing in those bands. That’s a really significant thing for me too.”

Matching the musical improvising will be the visual landscapes UK video artist Paul Rogers, himself conjuring up images in the moment. “I’ve known Paul for a number of years through his work in Infinite Decimals and find him a simply stunning live improviser.”