My name is Ivan Beaufils.
I study IGP – Voice, IGP – Piano, and Education (ME & IME) since 2018.
Favourite place at the mdw and why: The Campus lawn on a beautiful summer day. Soaking up the warm sun and feeling the cool grass is just so good—a little moment of lightness. I also love observing people as they go about their everyday activities. And since the Campus is more or less the mdw’s central node, it serves up lots of nice, spontaneous encounters.
Favourite place in Vienna: The Donauinsel—what else? It’s a place for everybody—and a symbol of how valuable successful public policy and good city planning can be.
What I wish I’d known back when I started studying here:
That artistic work, teaching, and mediation needn’t be thought of separately and in fact enrich each other. That music and musical theatre can give rise to multi-layered spaces of encounter and experience that extend far beyond a perfectly rehearsed performance—because it’s in lively dialogue and exchange, through openness to risk and unpredictability, and in moments of authenticity that my most intense artistic experiences now arise. And that you needn’t make any final decisions, like on a genre or an instrument or an art form. It’s rewarding to trust in your own artistic path instead of letting yourself be limited by others’ expectations of a particular profession—like “singer”, for instance.
Your work often plays out at the interface of teaching, community music, and artistic performance, and your musical doings feature a lot of variety. How did all that come about, and why is it important to you?
Over the course of my studies here, I’ve become increasingly aware of how my interests really are just very diverse—and how I don’t want to box myself in. So I’ve tapped into the full breadth of what the mdw has to offer. I started studying to be a schoolteacher in 2018 with voice as my artistic major. As time went by, I added other artistic and educational studies: piano, choir directing, and additional focuses in the area of popular music. My most pivotal professional experiences have been as a choir director and leading participatory projects as a music mediator. To me, the artistic quality that arises when people from the most diverse backgrounds and levels of pre-existing knowledge join forces to develop something is very special. And I soon realised that I wanted to use my artistic and educational pursuits to create spaces of encounter—be they in concerts, onstage, in workshops, or in choirs. Spaces where differences are viewed not as obstacles but as resources, where people engage in exchange and opinions rub against one another, ultimately producing something that moves us all. In short: spaces of lived democracy. And in this work, I think that diversity, openness, and flexibility are absolutely essential.
