Finding Your Voice!

What’s important in today’s workshop is to get it that we use the WHOLE BODY to speak and sing! But not just to get this concept in the head, to feel it in the body.

Over 30 practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds came together last week for a motivating and informative session entitled ‘Finding Your Voice’  The aims of this session was to  explore our voices in a practical, experiential way, and to consider how to use it more effectively and also to reflect on our relationship with our voice.

We learned that the root of the word ‘person’ is per-sonare – someone who is ‘sounded through’  - so ‘finding our voice’ could in fact be far more than just making a noise….

We spent some time exploring the technical points about how our voice ‘works’ - the motor (lungs) the generators (vocal cords) the articulators (tongue, lips, etc) and resonators voice box, mouth  - the whole body! After learning a series of vocal warm up exercises and a fantastic sing – ‘Throw, Catch, Turn Around’

We then explored some of the more important aspects of our own relationship with our voice thinking about some of the questions such as

Do you ever think about your voice?

What have other people said about your voice?

Has this given you an opinion about you and your voice?

What is your relationship to your voice? How would you characterise your relationship to your voice?  “My voice and I...”

We finished with a fantastic rendition of Yonder Come Day – have a listen to what we found we could do with our voices after three hours of learning how to use the WHOLE BODY to speak and sing.

And the body is connected to everything around it – the voice is EVERYWHERE...