Welcome to Noisy Women Present
The Noisy Women Present is a multi disciplinary creative hub championing diversity and collective virtuosity.
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About Noisy Women
The Noisy Women Present is a multi-disciplinary creative hub championing diversity and collective virtuosity. We provide an inclusive, supportive space for women/non-binary performers across all disciplines.
Our concerts, workshops and events embrace improvised and experimental music, dancing, art and poetry. We believe in individual expression as part of a collaborative, liberating experience. Our associated ensemble, the Noisy People’s Improvising Orchestra, explores these ideals on a grander scale, and welcomes performers with neuro-diversity and learning differences.
We look forward to seeing you at our next event and welcome collaborations from like-minded performers.
Noisy People’s Improvising Orchestra
The concept of the Noisy People’s Improvising Orchestra came about through conversations between Faradena Afifi and co-founder Dominic Mulvey, a poet and artist who lived with schizophrenia and a chronic lung condition. Dominic used music art, poetry and being a Krishna devotee to maintain a healthy, balanced and fulfilled life full of friends, food and love. The inaugural concert of the Noisy People’s Improvising Orchestra took place on 15th July 2022 at St Pauls Church, Cambridge, 6 months after Dominic had passed, to celebrate his inclusive and open-minded approach to connecting with and socially including human beings through the arts. The orchestra, made up of 80 people of mixed ability, mixed culture, mixed gender and sexuality, included international musicians, vocalists, poets, dancers and visual artists. Also taking part were members of the Tuneless Choir Cambridge, a mental-health-focussed on-site art workshop, and. photographers and announcers with learning disabilities. The Noisy People’s Orchestra epitomises Dominic’s way of valuing and encouraging all human beings through the arts and continues to champion social inclusivity.
Meet the artists
Founder of The Noisy Women Present, and The Noisy People’s Improvising Orchestra, Fara is also an initiator, connector and performer. Faradena is a person with neurodiversity who has mixed Afghan/British heritage. She is a T’ai Chi Chuan practitioner/instructor, folk singer and improvising community musician who plays bowed string instruments, piano and percussion. She also specialises in healing music and T’ai Chi-based exercises for people with learning differences and brain injuries/conditions.
During lockdown 2020, through jamming online with Maggie Nicols, Fara joined the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra (GIO) and the Improvising Ensemble (IE). This led to performing with the London Improvisers Orchestra (LIO), and with Maggie Nicol’s Creative Liberation Orchestra in Stockholm 2021 and various musicians since. She co-leads the International Online Improvising Workshop with Tony Hardie Bick, the online sister of The London Improvising Workshop, originally started by Eddie Prevost.
When not teaching or performing on stage, she is out busking with Cambridge musician Banjo Nick.
Marion is a performer, accompanist, teacher and independent scholar. She enjoys all types of music; classically trained, she now plays in folk bands as well with other improvising musicians. Her academic interests are inter-disciplinary and combine music and literature. She has an MA in Women’s Studies and her PhD thesis examined the use of music in the novels of the Black American woman writer Toni Morrison. She has also jointly published several articles on the polymath writer and composer E.T.A. Hoffmann.
Having spent much of her working life teaching music and literature, during lockdown Marion was introduced to the world of improvising music by Faradena Afifi and became a founding member of the Noisy Women. Through jamming online with Faradena and Maggie Nicols, Marion joined the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra (GIO). This led to performing with the London Improvisers Orchestra (LIO), including the International Online Improvising Workshop with Tony Hardie Bick.
A London-based, Dutch visual artist and performer, Gwendolyn is a curator of visual art. A graduate of Chelsea College of Art, her work is based on rhythm, music and dance, and captures the intangible poetry of the ephemeral moment. She is an established participant in the improvised music scene, regularly painting live improvised at the Vortex, Café Oto, Iklectik and Hundred Years Gallery. She collaborates with highly regarded musicians including celebrated Chinese percussionist Beibei Wang, Orphy Robinson MBE and legendary improviser Maggie Nicols. She co-founded new collective Noisy Women, whose launch featured in iconic magazine The Wire, and was recently interviewed on Soho Radio.
Gwendolyn’s vivacious artworks are instantly recognisable for their distinct use of colour. Her work has featured at the prestigious Menuhin Concert Hall, Toulouse Lautrec, Vortex Jazz Club, album covers and in private art collections in the UK and abroad. She has just held her first solo show and launched Limited Edition Prints.
@GwendolynKassenaar
https://www.instagram.com/gwendolynkassenaar/
https://www.facebook.com/gwendolynkassenaar/
Trumpeter Charlotte wears her love for free improvisation on her sleeve. Whether performing regularly as a soloist, or leading a variety of ensembles, including her Right Here, Right Now Quartet, she carefully carves out spaces for free movement of ideas and individual expression.
Charlotte refers to her instruments as ‘Sound Brushes’.
Her debut album, released in 2021 on Discus Music, ‘Right Here, Right Now’ is where you’ll find a vibrant selection of her soundscapes:
https://discusmusic.bandcamp.com/album/right-here-right-now-107cd-2021
She performed a duet with the mighty City of London as part of renowned trumpeter Dave Douglas’ 2022 Festival of New Trumpet Music:
Her music has been featured on BBC Radio 3, Jazz FM and BBC Radio 6; she’s been described as a ‘prolific’, ‘dynamic’ and ‘excellent improviser!’, by the likes of Corey Mwamba, Stuart Maconie and Jez Nelson.
Joanne is an Essex-based improvising vocalist via Groningen Vocal Exploration Choir and Faradena Afifi’s Noisy Peoples Orchestra and is now a member of The Noisy Women Present.
She has taken part in The Gathering, the LIO and is a regular participant of the London Improvisation Workshop.
Maggie joined London’s legendary Spontaneous Music Ensemble in 1968 as a free improvisation vocalist. She then became active running voice workshops with an involvement in local experimental theatre. She later joined the group Centipede, led by Keith Tippets and in 1977, with musician/composer Lindsay Cooper, formed the remarkable Feminist Improvising Group.
Maggie continues performing and recording challenging and beautiful work, in music and theatre, in collaborations with a range of artists (Irene Schweitzer, Joelle Leandre, Ken Hyder, Caroline Kraabel) as well as solo.
Nicky is a creative practitioner whose passions lie in dance, sound, words & nature. As a qualified & experienced Meditation Teacher, Embodied Movement Teacher & Sound Artist she is interested in these as a developmental practice & enquiry into what it means to be a human being in these times. Nicky has collaborated with many musicians, forming duos, bands, playing covers, original material & experimental movement & sound. She has performed at The Junction in Cambridge, The Strawberry Fair in Cambridge, Green Earth Awakening, Pink Fest & Playfest. Being someone who strongly believes in community, inclusivity & grass roots, Nicky is actively engaged in organising creative events and community building.
Nicky met Maggie Nichols at a workshop in Liverpool in the 90s which left a lasting impression of improvised creative practise. She reconnected with Maggie through The Noisy Women project in 2020 and has been mentored by Maggie since then. Nicky has participated in experimental, improv gigs at Cafe Oto in London, The Vortex in London, Winter Sounds in Canterbury & The Noisy People’s Orchestra in Cambridge.
Maham is a performer and composer/sound artist. She has a multi-lingual live and recorded repertoire, with sample-based, textural and hybrid arrangements. Whereas her recently released project, “Mitti”, entails alternative cross-genre fusion, her older and current words embody more digitally processed samples, and looping and beat-programming on Ableton.
Maham has worked and collaborated extensively, internationally, as a performer, composer and producer. She has also curated some live acts and events internationally. Maham has multiple awards and honours to her credit, including the International Songwriting Competition 2021 Honorable Mentions winner; female vocals winner at the Stars of Tomorrow music contest, India, 2022; she was also one of 10 global artists to receive the Geothe Talents’ Scholarship residency in Germany 2017. She has media presence on radio, blogs and in publications across 10 countries and currently lives and works in London, England.
A photographer who has embraced a flamboyant and colourful style. Since retiring and leaving the grey-suited life of the city behind, he has been developing his B&W (and colour) photography and more colourful style.
Being dyslexic as well, he looks at the world slightly differently from most people, using this ability to find an interesting take on what he photographs and hopefully produce images with a degree of originality.
Julian is a guitarist, bassist and composer based in London, currently studying for a Postgraduate degree at the Guildhall School of Music. Julian is interested in exploring new and unusual musical colours by making use of microtonality and polystylism in the context of improvised music. A graduate of Oxford University, he was highly active during his time as a student, leading the University Jazz Society house band, and playing in everything from a jazz orchestra to a classical guitar quartet. He has studied with pioneer Philipp Gerschlauer and other microtonal theorists/composers, and is a current student of the Julian Joseph Jazz Academy.
Current projects include adapting Arabic and Turkish traditional music and Ives quartertone piano works onto modified guitars, and performing with the London Improvisers Orchestra.
In her work as a performance artist Anne uses sound to explore a myriad of ways to express emotion and the way of being human. From her earliest influences in singing the Irish sean nós, an unaccompanied form of singing deeply rooted in her ancient Irish ancestral heritage of The Curragh in Kildare, Ireland. She has worked solo and with performance groups to create soundworks, and wherever she goes, Anne seeks out a local session of vocal unaccompanied singers.
Anne works with the body and vocal sound as a body psychotherapist, performance artist, singer-songwriter, poet, physical theatre and lover of the spoken word. Her body psychotherapy practice is in Cambridge, where she also sees people for sound healing sessions both online and in person. Visit www.annelryan.co.uk
Past Gigs
The Noisies had a wonderful time at Wintersound Canterbury with The Free Range Orchestra. They were joined by Evan Parker and Kristin Fredricksson.
