weaving Voices 01.04.2025 issuu - Flipbook - Page 15
Extension of the senses,
resonating bodies and spaces
Walli Höfinger and Christiane Hommelsheim
So it is certainly round with a fireplace in the middle
and it goes up to the top of the sky in the middle.
For some reason the water is like an ally, the old water.
It really helps me to cleanse, clarify, and widen my vision.
It is like the wind that touches, caresses my skin.
It’s like the smell of the fresh air, the sound of the wind in the trees.
The warm sensation of the sun on my skin, the birdsong around.
And what I really enjoy is that we shift roles.
I think if I weren’t that rooted and supported
by those roots I would live differently.
We were invited to the Weaving Voices Project in our capacities
as freelance artists and voice teachers. We are both based close
to Berlin and also accredited teachers of the Roy Hart Centre in
Malérargues, France. Next to hosting a voice workshop at Gutshof
Reichenow, near Berlin, we travelled to most legs of the project to
participate.
It has been most helpful for our own practice and artistic horizons
to have the opportunity to learn and experience the other partners’
worlds and skills. Participating was a rare opportunity to be taken
into communities and meet people whom one would probably never
meet, if not facilitated by projects like this. Weaving Voices is an
inter-cultural and inter-generational project, as is the context of the
Roy Hart Centre voice work. We have many years of experience of
bringing people from different backgrounds, ages and countries
together and open the space for voice work and singing. But we
rarely meet vulnerable groups, like the people ‘seeking sanctuary’
in Leeds, UK, or the groups in a recovery from addiction process in
Kómló, Hungary. This is where the social and artistic aspects overlap.
So I might have to let go of things.”
IPoem, Walli Höfinger (Weaving Voices, Leeds, 2024)
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Touched by the power of personal story and experience, we would
like to share our own personal journeys with the voice and what the
voice, in our view, is a symptom of, alongside giving some general
information about our approach to working with people and their
voices. Interspersed you will find exercises you are invited to do on
your own. There are countless different perspectives from which
one can look at the complex phenomena of the human voice. In
our workshops we invite participants to explore all the colours and
expressive possibilities of the voice, regardless of aesthetic norms.
We look at the relationship between voice and body as well as
that between voice and consciousness, and adventure beyond the
accustomed patterns of how the voice is habitually perceived and
used. In the words of Margaret Cameron:
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