LIFESONG – 10-week intensive course
Admission to Lifesong begins with a personal interview.
Please contact Chris.
NEXT SESSION: winter 2024
Once a week, 7-10PM Location tbd
Reclaim the natural malleability of your voice so that the emotional and spiritual bounty of your inner landscape, borne on your words, can sing itself into the hearts and souls of all who listen to you.
Based on the principles of Voice Movement Therapy, Lifesong offers an opportunity to explore your voice as an instrument of self-healing and life transformation. Lifesong is exercise for the voice. It opens you up — physically, emotionally, spiritually — to more fully express the genuine, authentic, multi-faceted you.
Lifesong groups are kept small, so that everyone can receive lots of personal attention.
8 participants maximum – preferably fully vaccinated
Lifesong is not for casual participation. Voice work is fun, but it can also be emotionally and physically challenging. Participants can expect to spend about three hours per week doing homework in addition to class time.
“I live by breathing in and breathing out. I sing by transforming this breath into sound, sound which in turn forms the material for the contents of the soul.”
– Alfred Wolfsohn
What is LifeSong?
Lifesong helps you grow a voice that is responsive to your inner landscape and flexible enough to convey your own emotional and spiritual music.
Before we could speak, our voices were totally uninhibited. As babies we used an amazing array of sounds. As our interior experience changed, the sounds we made changed too. As we acquired words we made less and less use of the physical agility of our vocal instrument. Our voices lost much of their ability to authentically convey the feelings underneath our words.
In Lifesong, we explore the sonic possibilities we were born with, to reclaim our full range of sounds, and allow us a broader vocal palette for expressing what lives within us.
"I really appreciated your approach to music, that it is a creative process that everyone is free to experience, and not just available to those who are considered "talented" or "musicians". I love this way of looking at music and will keep exploring, discovering and experience it because I truly enjoy it." Hazel, Lifesong graduate, Ottawa ON
How does LifeSong Work?
Every evening of LifeSong has two parts:
Physical Movement & Vocal exploration:
Participants use free movement to probe the interconnections between breath, motion, emotion and voice. This part of the evening is devoted to increasing the malleability of our vocal instrument by exploring 10 different parameters of voice production.
Autobiography:
In the second half of the evening, participants explore the various themes of their lives by telling stories and singing songs that they, themselves, have written.
Songs? Singing?
You don’t need to have musical experience to do Lifesong. We will work together to take the lines you’ve written and play with them, exaggerating the natural rise and fall of the spoken language, expanding and freeing your voice, until your uncontrived melody emerges spontaneously from the well of joy or pain, laughter or despair, anger or delight, that bubbles within you.
