Enabling Singing Villages
Training for Vocal Leaders
These are four-day, non residential courses held biannually in North London. They aim to give participants a chance to explore vocal improvisation, learn and consolidate tools and techniques to share with others. The trainings will help them deepen their understanding and practice of different forms of spontaneous collective song, including collaborative vocal improvisation and circlesinging.
What will be covered?
The core of these courses is based around singing together and reflecting together, as much as receiving information, ideas and tools. Cultivating an awareness of the personal, interpersonal and transpersonal, and learning a variety of musical activities, to encourage these three levels of awareness in the participants.
Circlesongs and CVI are ways to reclaim everyone’s innate musicianship and capacity to collaborate and co- create. Through experience, we will explore how they can play a part in transforming individual and collective consciousness.
Body, breath and movement are essential partners for an embodied practice of vocal improvisation. Also: silence, the meditative element, introducing humour and depth. These are key ways of bringing people together and into an open state.
We will cultivate flexibility, responsiveness, the facilitator’s presence and being in the flow. Balancing the structured and the intuitive.
Circlesinging: ways to create effective patterns and develop them, circlesong conduction, form and storytelling. Understanding the structure and evolution of a circlesong, modifying the material in real time, adapting and learning from the participants.
CVI: different models of collaboration, from free form to groove - based improvisation. Cultivating mutual listening and spaciousness - exploring vocal identity and archetypes- developing invented language - utilising body, rhythm, voice as instrument and words.
Personal practice: ways to improve our own creativity and musical skills, develop our vocal resources and flexibility. Ideas for individual a cappella practice, and with looping devices.
Troubleshooting: dealing with complex group dynamics, internal (inner gremlins) and external challenges. The self-care of the facilitator.
What are the skills to develop?
Relational skills are essential for a facilitator of creative processes: encouraging release, connection, responsivity, inviting change and deep listening , engaging participants with different needs.
The facilitator’s toolkit involves exercises and games in the areas of rhythm, melody construction, use of invented language, harmony and tone quality.
When facilitating spontaneous collective song, the facilitator’s focus is:
to hold space for others, in each person’s safe, supportive, open-hearted and unique way.
to help create strong, supportive, interesting musical structures for participants to connect, gain confidence, explore and develop their improvisational skills.
Is this for me?
If you already work with people’s voices in choirs, singing groups, therapeutic, community or ceremonial settings, this training will offer you different ways to incorporate vocal improvisation into your practice. Also if you come from a background of musical, movement or theatre improvisation, and want to include voice and music in your practice and facilitation.
Regardless of the capacity and experience of your participants, Circlesinging and Collaborative Vocal Improvisation foster connection and community, unlock creativity and vocal skills, and can transform the resonance of any group of singing humans.
They relate to ancestral ways of making music, where every voice counts, and encourage playful, deep and enriching learning processes. They invite people to develop their musicality and expressiveness together, in a shared space free of judgement.
This variety of skills helps everyone to cultivate different ways of learning and become more capable, rounded and flexible, more confident in experimenting and enabling ‘singing villages’: spontaneous singing and moving activities.
The training also offers everyone keys into developing their personal practice as vocal improvisers. This is an essential skill set to ‘walk the walk’ as vocal improv leaders, and to enrich their vocal and creative palette.
If you are considering joining the training and would like to do some preparatory work, or you have some questions or themes that you’d like to explore beforehand, feel free to contact me to arrange an individual mentoring session.