The Nature of Singing - Your Breath, Your Song, Your Self
The Nature of Singing presented by six experienced Feldenkrais Practitioners and master singers is a 12 hour training that will explore the idea of being ‘ready to sing’. The workshops are experiential and appropriate for everyone. There will be exploration of functions like breathing, awareness of sensations of the articulators and their role in singing, posture, performance excitement vs anxiety, and discovering new pathways for releasing your sound that lead to greater vocal and personal freedom. The experiences offered can lead to fullness of expression in singing, teaching and in life.
Recorded live on Zoom
Cost: $240 for video streaming of all six workshops, 12 hours total
Day 1
1. Shaping the Self for Comfort with Deborah Bowes
This workshop will help develop your flexibility and self-awareness to quickly notice and adjust your posture in sitting and standing. You can be more comfortable and modify how you ‘shape’ yourself by using a simple reference system that Moshe Feldenkrais called the Primary Image. The Primary Image includes the length of the spine, the relationships of the hips and shoulders, and the directions of the arms and legs. The primary image is a personal geometry that is useful for learning to change postural habits, improve balance of all the joints and for learning any movement.
Deborah Bowes has been a Feldenkrais Teacher in San Francisco for more than 30 years. Her doctoral research investigated the use of the Feldenkrais Method to improve awareness and functioning of the pelvic floor. She does sing and play with her ukulele ensemble for many non-profit organizations, but is not a professional singer. She works with singers to improve the quality of movement, breathing and posture.
2. Sensing the Spectrum of Sound with Robert Sussuma
Working with both hearing (sound perception) and listening (thoughtful attention to what we sense and hear), Robert will guide you through a series of experiences and experiments that will reveal a hidden world of sensory abilities related to how we hear, what we hear and how we can improve that entire process through self-touch, movement and sensory awareness. From there, we will explore moving the spectrum of sound in various novel ways to improve vocal ability and expression.
Robert Sussuma, originally from New York City, is an explorer, a life-long learner and a connoisseur of connections: movement, speaking and singing, voice science, emotions, music, motor learning, neurology-in-action, and deep personal development. His formal education is in Vocal Performance (Bachelors of Music in Voice Performance and Masters of Music in Early Music Voice Performance) and he has performed professionally as a countertenor. In addition, he is a Guild Certified Feldenkrais® Practitioner. Robert has been a faculty member at Naropa University (Boulder, Colorado), Haverford College (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) and PACE University (New York, New York) and a guest lecturer at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and Barcelona University. After maintaining an active private voice studio for 20 years, in-person and online, working with well-known and successful actors and singers in NYC, on Broadway, and around the world, he has recently launched two innovative online programs that are the culmination of all of his work and discoveries designed to update the vocal system from the inside out: THE SINGING SELF PROGRAM. There's even a special track for voice teachers. For more information visit www.thesingingself.com
Day 2
3. A Postural Approach to Breath Control
with Richard Corbeil
Richard will present a lesson designed to improve breath control by fine tuning our dynamic posture with the coordination of our respiratory movements; a learning process involving intention, attention, and relaxing motion.
As a singer and a Feldenkrais Trainer, Richard Corbeil has been contributing his unique understanding of the Feldenkrais Method® to the fields of personal development, health, and the performing arts for over 30 years. Recordings of his teaching is available on https://vocalintegration.bandcamp.com.
4. Language, Symbol and Gesture in Singing with Karen Clark
The eye reads a symbol, a word, musical note, the internal ear imagines a sound, the lips and tongue form a syllable or word, and a tone or utterance is emitted. In this workshop Karen offers awareness exercises to clarify our sensations of the speech articulators and suggests a creative process— led by imagination and intention— toward expanding our palette of vocal colors and musical gestures.
Karen Clark, contralto holds degrees from the Indiana University School of Music where she studied opera and early music. She has taught in the music departments at Princeton University, Swarthmore College, Sonoma State, UC Berkeley, and in the Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California. Karen studied the Feldenkrais Method under Russell Delman and Alan Questel (1999) and since has presented workshops across the U.S. Karen’s articles on singing, The Impulse to Sing, and, Sounds Unfamiliar are published in the Feldenkrais Journal. Considered a leading interpreter of medieval and modern music, Karen has performed and recorded worldwide with eminent ensembles, such as, Boston Camerata, Sequentia, the Joshua Rifkin Bach Ensemble. Most recent recordings— on the Music & Arts label— include 12th century music of Hildegard von Bingen with her ensemble Vajra Voices, and the song cycle, Dream Drapery— Songs on Thoreau, written for her and the Galax Quartet by Pulitzer/Grammy award winning composer, Joseph Schwantner. Karen is staying home in Petaluma, CA with her partner, Roy Whelden, and cat Molly and looks forward to blackberry pie season.
Day 3
5. Breath and the Inner Smile
with Drew Minter
Working with movements of basic flexion and extension taught by Feldenkrais, we explore the breath using the tapping and vocalization techniques of Carl Stough and the Emotional Freedom Technique. Taken together, these bring greater elasticity to the rib cage and a liveliness to the face, earmarked by Stephen Porges in his elaborations of polyvagal theory as critical to freeing ourselves from trauma, creating the classic “inner smile” which has been taught by singing teachers for centuries. From there you can emit any variety of free sounds, depending on how you desire to shape and move them.
As an internationally known countertenor for four decades, Drew Minter sang leading roles in the opera houses of Brussels, Toulouse, Boston, Washington, Santa Fe, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Wolf Trap, Glimmerglass, Nice, Marseilles and others, performing with many of the world's foremost baroque orchestras, and making over 70 recordings. Drew is Senior Music Lecturer at Vassar College, where he teaches voice, choir, opera and the Feldenkrais Method to musicians; he is an opera director and teaches frequent workshops in the singing and acting of opera, incorporating several somatic methods: Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, and the Viewpoints acting work. His additional training is in Polarity, Jin shin jyutsu, Kahuna work and Body Electric.
6. Breathing as a Guide with Stephen Paparo
In this workshop, Stephen will offer two contrasting lessons designed to cultivate awareness of the breath for singing. The first lesson will foreground the breath while exploring large muscle movements in order to develop low belly breathing and skeletal support. The second will explore small muscle movements while exhaling and inhaling as a means to calm your nervous system. Both explorations will profoundly impact your readiness to sing by reducing tension, stress, and anxiety and bringing greater clarity to your sense of self.
Dr. Stephen A. Paparo is Associate Professor of Music Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and conductor of the University Chorale. He holds degrees from Michigan State University (Ph.D.), Syracuse University (M.M.), and Ithaca College (B.M.). A Guild Certified Practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method® since 2006, he has taught Feldenkrais in the US and internationally. He is active as a guest conductor and regularly presents at international, national, and state conferences. He currently serves as Past-President for the Massachusetts chapter of the American Choral Directors Association. His research interests include the application of the Feldenkrais Method to singing instruction, non-traditional choral ensembles, and LGBTQ studies in music education. He is published in Bulletin for the Council of Research in Music Education, International Journal of Music Education, and Music Education Research, and Musicianship: Composing in Choir (GIA Publications). His compositions for beginning choirs are published by Alfred Music.
Life is a Song
Sing it