About Emotionally Integrated Voice

Breath and voice are seated deep within the autonomic nervous system. The human animal is designed to reveal feeling in a flash through bursts of non-verbal vocal sound. Our complex survival needs, social abilities and linguistic gifts don’t always align with this transparency and can lead an individual to alter their voice or silence it completely. 

Emotionally Integrated Voice is an approach to sung and extended voice that reclaims a sustainable conversation between breath and sound through consciously weaving fight or flight with rest and digest. It messes around in the impoliteness of singing while looking for an integrated economy of effort. 

The work is physically active, elemental and creative. The expansiveness of breath is revealed through yawns and sighs. Pitch and resonance are rediscovered through a radical exploration of non-verbal expression. The exercises are accessible and draw from Fides’s thirty-five year relationship with mentor Richard Armstrong (Roy Hart Theatre), two decades of creation with Toronto based collective URGE, Fides’s teacher training practice and forty year’s of interdisciplinary performance. 

This week long course is for singers and non singers alike and I’d like each of you to bring a song. It should be something that you love – that when you listen to it or sing it the experience makes you want to weep, or jump for joy, or honour your desires. I would like sheet music for it as well. We can have email conversation to sort out these details in the weeks leading up to our time north. You need to know one verse and one chorus by heart. Get ready to be surprised!