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Two more workshops and one evening of performance later….

Yesterday afternoon I did a Sound Poetry workshop with Paul Dutton. This ended up as a great opportuntity to experiment with my resonating apparatus as just that: a resonanting apparatus.
Paul started the workshop by talking for about 50 minutes about Sound Poetry, including a discussion about overtone singing, which was interesting in comparison with the workshop I did with Mongolian Throat singer Tran Quan Ha at the 2005 Making New Waves festival in Budapest. Paul revealed that he had never studied overtone singing, rather it was something he stumbled on through his own vocal experimentation. …and hey, isn’t that what it’s about?

After his talk he led us through a practical exercise to help us find our own unique sounds. It worked for me. I found new sounds and started to explore ways to make new sounds, and that for me is what workshopping should be about. Paul could easily run two hour workshops where he talks for 15 minutes, then leads the participants through a 30 minute vocal exploration followed by a talkback session, followed by some paired and individual presentation…and maybe I could do the same?

This afternoon I did a workshop with Vancouver vocal artist DB Boyko. Tra la. All women (again…we were all women in the Wende Bartley workshop as well, whereas Paul Dutton pulled in a few young men. Hmmm, is that because men don’t think they can learn about the voice from women? or because they aren’t interested in exploring their voice in the organic way these women work? Hmmm…Paul Dutton has an organic approach. Wonder why the young men did not show for the women-led workshops…)

In any case, DB attracted the largest group I’ve seen yet at the workshops. There were nine of us at the beginning, and one person drifted off during the workshop - called away by other committments.

She had us doing the usual lying on the floor routine (as did Paul) with vowel resonance working from a loose approximation of the chakras. Then she had us in a circle, and went round pairing us off and giving each pair different sounds to make. That was followed by some improvised vocal scenes, with two leads sounding an assigned word each, and two people sounding back-up with an assigned sound. Then we each had a brief solo presentation which we improvised round an assigned word, focussing on the consonants. (My two words for these two exercises were uvula, and monkey. Uvula came out like an opera singer and monkey emeerged like a jazz fusion number…. Insert image of me grinning like chesire cat!)

Last night we presented the results of our Earth Echo workshop with Wende Bartley. There were six of us. I was pleased with the results, as were the others. We also had good audience feedback.

It was followed by a solo performance by Cathy Lewis, and a group performance of Wende Bartley’s work in progress Descending Wild. I will write more about those performances later. Right now I am off to hear DB Boyko and Christopher Butterfield.

May 30th: It’s been two weeks since the Voice++ festival and my memory of the concerts is not fresh so I will write only a few words. Wende Bartley’s Descending Wild is a work-in-progress, melding and layering acoustic instrumentation (cello and flute) with electronic sound, and live voice. The performance I saw/heard had moments that were very coherent, and clearly further developed than others. It is a deep, mysterious work exploring the sounds of the earth.