Enabling Singing Villages
Training for Vocal Leaders
These are four-day, non residential courses, held biannually in North London, and in Europe. They offer participants an opportunity to learn and consolidate tools and techniques for vocal improvisation, practice facilitation, reflect and share with others. The trainings are designed to help everyone deepen their understanding and practice of different forms of spontaneous collective singing, including co-improv 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 of the ‘bigger picture’.
Every song leader will have the opportunity to lead and be led by others, as well as acquire some fundamental tools to develop their own improvisational language and musicianship, and gain confidence in group-leading skills.
These four days are an invitation for everyone to begin a deep journey into their personal practice and explore together from their differences, openly sharing strengths and challenges, inventiveness and resources.
Elements of the programme:
Bringing people together and into an open state. Flows and games - presence, connection, collectivity.
The Singing Village Pedagogy: essential, transcultural foms of spontaneous singing offering different ways to share aliveness and deepen relationships, celebrating every voice.
The voices within: characters and archetypes as a way to expand our vocal and expressive palette.
Sonic landscapes: timbre, noise , texture and atmosphere - singing within the fabric of Life.
Circlesinging: Learning from participants, making efficient patterns, conducting, flexibility, form, song architecture…
Co-improv: listening- space- my vocal identity and style- invented language- body, rhythm and sound- models and forms
Adapting Spontaneous Collective Singing for community settings.
Conducting: roles- gestures. Encouraging, proposing, directing, leaving space. Giving feedback and inspiring change in participants.
The facilitator’s inner state - personal awareness and good housekeeping. Feeling, sensing, body techniques. Softening the inner critic, cultivating self acceptance and lightheartedness.
Troubleshooting. Responding to complex group dynamics and needs.
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, conduction and flows without words.
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 spontaneous singing 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, Spontaneous Collective Singing fosters connection and community, unlock creativity and vocal skills, and can transform the resonance of any group of singing humans.
It relates to ancestral ways of making music, where every voice counts, and encourage playful, deep and enriching learning processes. It invites 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.