The voice has many bodies, the body has many voices. If you have a text, but no melody, then you just need to sustain the silence – to listen to it as long as it's needed for a mumbling to become a rhythm, a melody to seduce you, until it bites your body and hits your heart. To hear yourself you need to be brave.
During this week we will work on the voice through the body to let it resonate when we sing, to let it carry our voice. We will arrive to our voice through physical exercises such as working with the diaphragm to develop stamina of our breath, massaging the body and positioning it to listen to the stream of emotions while opening the body resonators. The first part of each day includes warming up the body individually, followed by work in couples or groups. By tracing the body movements through improvisational tasks we explore how movement and voice are connected, how they follow and complement each other. Through improvisation we can unravel our personal voice identities that offer mirrors in which we can reflect upon our own strengths and fragilities. By listening closely we can get to know more deeply not only ourselves, but also our own voice material, expressions and songs. Working with breathing and deep relaxation, we resonate with and listen to our voice, arriving to our own rhythms and melodies, which we organically carry within us. This experimentation with sound will make space for different facets and stories to emerge and be amplified within the shared space. By moving the space with our own voices, we will gain the sensation of how we can touch our surroundings and the other through sound.
We will also explore working with a given text, approaching it as an acoustic composition, letting the embodiment of its form to lead us to sing with it, or to purely speak it. By approaching the text musically we can achieve different interpretations of it and give shape to a voice character, an improvised tune or a dance/movement sequence. Please bring a short text. It can be an excerpt from a theatre play, a piece of prose, a poem or just a few sentences of your choice.
Each day we will finish the work session with individual and group singing. During the week we will work on an old folk tune, most probably from the Slavic oral tradition. Just by singing the song – as simple as singing can be – we will learn the patience and receptivity of receiving from the song rather than doing the song. The song has already existed for many decades, so the work is more about being open to the song and listening to what it can teach us about ourselves.
Irena Z. Tomažin
