ESC: #openpavillon: We build things and social bonds! Two community building weeks between Arts, Gardening and Crafts

The Other Music Academy [OMA] is an experimental sociocultural center in Weimar. Its projects are always interdisciplinary, intercultural and hands-on, harnessing artistic and scientific practices to realize socially empowering goals. The OMA invites a very wide diversity of people into meaningful, genuine encounters – through music, dance, crafts, cultural history and more - aimed at overcoming divisive boundaries and biases and developing our cooperative human potential. The OMA has its home in an old school building, where it hosts the OMA café, ateliers, workshops and projects. Its main ongoing projects include Yiddish Summer Weimar, #openpavillon, the OMA Improvisation Project, the Middle Eastern Music & Cultures Project, and the Cabaret Workshop, among others. (Please see www.othermusicacademy.eu) The OMA is our vision of a new kind of institution: An Empowerment Center. To us, “empowerment” means to develop and strengthen the human potential for autonomy, creativity, efficacy, and social connection.That goal requires us to understand and overcome the many prejudices and structures whose aim is to disempower some of us, and which, in the end, disempower all of us. The long-term goal of the OMA is an open, inclusive society in which the most diverse kinds of people participate actively in the design and realization of their shared cultures. HOW DOES THE OMA WORK? What makes our way of working special is our concept of an “OMA-Project.” OMA-Projects are above all hands-on and practical. They provide a structure for all kinds of people to come together to achieve a goal that they design together. Every OMA-Project is guided from the start by diversity, cooperation and empowerment as values. A project is successful only if every participant gains new skills and practical knowledge while connecting people who might otherwise never meet. MAJOR OMA PROJECTS Some of our ongoing, major OMA projects include: Yiddish Summer Weimar (YSW), an annual summer institute and festival that explores Yiddish culture from a transcultural, historical and contemporary point of view. Led by a team of internationally respected artists and scholars, YSW takes intangible heritage and aural transmission as starting points for exploring questions of identity through immersive, holistic learning. Since 1998, more than 10,000 participants have learned about Yiddish and related song, instrumental music and dance traditions as well as the Yiddish language in YSW workshops, and more than 100,000 people have attended its concerts, jam sessions and numerous other public events. /// www.yiddishsummer.eu The OMA Improvisation Project, a platform for artists and scientists to research and and present new approaches to improvisation in music, dance and other performance arts. /// www.othermusicacademy.eu/improv The #openpavillon, an open-ended, socio-cultural construction site where arts and crafts meet. A highly diverse community develops methods for co-creation and projects involving building things together. #openpavillon and its sociocultural workshop-festival “Altenburg by the Sea” have been nominated for the 2021 federal Innovation Prize for Socioculture in the category Sustainability. /// www.openpavillon.eu The Caravan Orchestra & Choir, winner of the 2018 Shimon Peres Prize, is an exchange project between Yiddish Summer Weimar, the University of Haifa and the University of Music FRANZ LISZT Weimar. 30-45 young, culturally diverse musicians attend an annual 2-3 week residency in Haifa and Weimar to rehearse and perform concerts in a social/educational framework. /// www.caravanorchestra.eu