My name is Anastasia (Αναστασία in greek),

I have been involved in the Cysylltu project since the summer of 2023.

In terms of my musical experience, it's certainly an interesting one. Although I am a classically trained cellist, I've always been someone who says "yes!" to a challenge, which at times has meant joining a punk band, a few folk groups, a hard rock band, some greek art-song (έντεχνο) groups, and, as of recently, a spoken word and music group. Needless to say, I have found these activities just as useful and fascinating as any opportunity I've had to play for and learn from some of the most wonderful and inspiring classical cellists and performance coaches I know of. Aside from these activities, I am also keen on community music making. Coming from a small village in the outskirts of Thessaloniki, in Greece, I found the community in North Wales incredibly welcoming when I first moved here. As a result of university music ensembles, which are also open to the local community in and around Bangor, I was able to meet new people at various phases of their lives, and working with the local community has been an outmost rewarding experience! Much of my community-based activity has included from local charity and community festivals to school outreach programmes and even hospital performances. In this way I have also had the luck to work as a conductor for various community ensembles, something which has truly helped me mature as a musician and foremost as a person.

Though I picked many of these activities back up following the COVID-19 pandemic, I felt for a log time that I had never fully recovered from the mental and physical isolation I felt at the time, which of course many of us felt, as well as some experiencing tragic loss in the process. It was truly a difficult time, which left many of us with scars which are often difficult to explain in words. Meeting Ellen and the Cysylltu team not long after such a life changing event was a dream! The idea of working with people within community settings in a multidisciplinary way and acting as facilitators for their creative expression was something that resonated with my own holistic approaches in working with community ensembles, so I was thrilled to be included in the project! Since the early days of the project, I have learned a lot and, to be completely transparent, I feel I have learned a lot about how to reflect on myself and my work in healthier ways and accepting the whole me. It also resonates with my PhD research (yes, I very much look forward to the day I get to say "it's not Miss, it's Dr!") which is interested in reparative music history, focusing on women living in fin-de-siècle London. It might seem strange to read this - "how is this relevant?" - but hear me out: it's not about the subject matter, but the reparation. Though in my personal research I seek to restore a mostly forgotten historical figure whilst also highlighting the social position of women musicians at the time, the "repair" and "recover" aspect is true in the Cysylltu space too, just in a different way. We seek to help both ourselves, individuals and groups of people to reflect on our own trauma, the insecurities, and other aspects that we may struggle with, and to accept them, to express our frustrations and difficulties in a creative way and in a way start the reparation process, or at least enable it creatively, and this, I think, is what Cysylltu means to me. I think it's beautiful and I look forward to more exciting collaborative opportunities with this group!