Embodied Voice - 4 Week Series

with Hanne Dollase

The goal of these workshops is to help the participants find their true and authentic voice through breath and body work. There will be some phonating on pitches but you do not have to be a singer to participate.

Workshop 1: We will focus on how a healthy voice is an extension of healthy breath and body usage. We will explore different ways to take a breath for different occasions. It will involve lying on the floor, using a ball against the wall and doing various yoga poses, all the while trying out different sounds. The class will end with a group discussion where anyone who chooses can share with me (and the class) their voice issues and/or experiences and how we can work on solving them in this class.

Workshop 2: In this workshop we go deeper into the voice/body connection/awareness. Using some of the same exercises from the previous class, we are going to be in slightly different body positions doing them. We are also going to explore the “Sacred No” and the Sacred Yes” though yoga poses and connection to the breath and body.
The class will end with a group discussions of what our personal Sacred Yes’s and No’s are, and how we can implement them in daily life.

Workshop 3: In this workshop we are taking the techniques we have learned so far and doing some poetry reading, deciding how loud or soft we want to be at specific places; how we can stay ‘in the body’ even though there are other things in play now. We are then going to explore Patsy Rothenburg’s “three circles” where we walk around the space speaking out. At the end of the class we are going to discuss how the circles made us feel and how we can connect it to what we have learned in previous workshops.

Workshop 4: In this last workshop we are going to put together everything we have learned by doing all the exercises and then having fun with poems, limericks or homemade monologues.