Who can I teach?
I have taught voice practice at all levels. For workplace voice users, I focus on vocal health, how to access breathing styles that support projection and communication, and access to full-body and facial expressivity, as well as basic principles of vocal tract health and maintenance. For performers, I focus very strongly on access to timbres and textures, and on finding your unique anatomy’s own ways of breathing and own unique range of possible sounds. Poetic text interpretation and variation are at the fore, in speech and in song. For advanced performers, I teach ‘extended’ technique: how to access the widest possible range of sounds healthily and without injury, including hyper-emotional sounds and intercultural sounds. For dancers and acrobats: I have worked extensively with dancers and other movers on how to vocalise and project with and alongside movement. For people who identify as having non-normative, or extra-normal, identities or bodies: I work with you to find what your voice is.
What are my values?
Choice, choice and choice; pleasure, pleasure and pleasure; contact, contact and contact through the voice. I believe that we all have the right to make the sounds that give us pleasure and make us feel most ourselves; and that each body does this, in part, in its own unique way. I find ways to enable the vocaliser to access these sounds and make them fill up rooms. This is an ‘empowerment’ approach, and people who feel their voices are less often heard in social space tend to particularly enjoy my teaching style. I support the voices of difference. At the same time, I teach the voice as a form of ‘social touch’ - a way of contacting other people with sound, and I pay attention to helping you notice how your voice touches others, and how you can mould your intentions so that you contact others with the intention you most wish.
What about breath? And how do I ‘make you’ sound?
I do not teach that there is any ‘right’ way to breathe. Rather, I teach that our bodies are full of options for ways of breathing, and that each way has an effect on how our voice sounds. Breathing style is a choice for how you wish to project. My teaching opens up new options for breathing and sound, rather than telling you ‘how to breathe’ or the ‘way you must sound.’
What are principles of vocal health?
I draw from speech and language therapy exercises taught to me by some of the best SLTs in the world to help you simply take care of and help rejuvenate your vocal anatomy.
I do not teach a named, registered trademarked vocal technique, though I believe all of these techniques each have great value. I am a former pupil of the deceased Jean Westerman Gregg, president of NATS and member of the American Academy of Teachers of Singing, bel canto pedagogue and vocal rehabilitation specialist trained in SLT, who firmly taught that speech and singing have the same technical source in the body, and whose work combining techniques from speech and language therapy and voice pedagogy was hugely influential. I worked with Amanda Smallbone at University of Winchester in the UK to develop approaches to voice that integrated speech and singing, and that assert that everyone can sing as well as project speech. As a specialist in extended technique, I synthesised my own methods from a range of inputs, and I work to help you do the same; this is mostly the case with extended technique! Later in my career, I studied Roy Hart voicework to refine my extended vocabulary.
Among the techniques I have studied:
Voice: with Frank Baker (singing), Jean Westerman Gregg (singing and speech), Valerie Kinslow (singing), Margaret Pikes (theatrical speech, singing, extended voice), Noah Pikes (theatrical speech, singing, extended voice), Dr Ruth Epstein (speech and language therapy and vocal health)
Improvisation in African-American Art Music: Bill Dixon, Arthur Brooks, Anthony Braxton
Bodyworks/somatics: Alexander technique, Radix body re-education; Psycho-corporeal and psycho-organic analysis (full diploma); Esalen Massage from the Institut Guijek, Montreal; contact improvisation; biodynamic massage.