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CPR Projects FOR THE CURIOUS opening worlds of performance INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF THE VOICE IN PERFORMANCE BOOKING INFORMATION The programme of workshops, presentations and contributors is accurate at time of going to press. The CPR reserves the right to change the programme. Workshops must be booked in advance and each workshop followed for its full term. Access to all other Festival events – workshops and evening presentations is open to all Festival ticket-holders (for that day). Please remember your ticket will give you access to the performance the evening before your workshops. Places are limited and early booking is advised! To make a booking please complete the booking form (please scroll down to the bottom of this web page to download a booking form or request one from CPR) and return it to the CPR together with a short letter of application, stating your choice of workshop with a short description of your interest and experience. Feel free to fax, or e-mail the same information to us. However, your place can only be confirmed once we have received a deposit from you of £50.00 (non-returnable) and full payment will be expected upon confirmation of your booking. (In the event of a participant canceling after full payment has been made, the CPR reserves the right to charge the full fee unless the place is taken by somebody else.) FULL members of the CPR are entitled to a 10% discount on the registration fee. The CPR has several membership schemes offering various services, benefits and discounts - please see CPR Membership for further information on these schemes. ACCOMMODATION/ LLETY Accommodation is not included in the registration fee, but we have reserved rooms in Aberystwyth university hall accommodation for the period Thursday 27th March to Tuesday 1st April inclusive. Accommodation costs £21 per person per night for bed and breakfast in a standard single room. A self-service evening meal costs £7. To book please contact Residential & Hospitality Services direct by telephone on 01970 621960 or by email at events@aber.ac.uk. Alternatively, a list of hotels and guesthouses in Aberystwyth is available from CPR. Os ydych chi’n gyfarwydd ag Aberystwyth neu Gaerdydd mae croeso i chi wneud eich trefniadau eich hunain ar gyfer llety a byddwn ninnau’n croesawu’r cyfle i gyfarfod unrhyw ffrindiau neu deulu sydd gennych chi yn y cylch yn nigwyddiadau Codi Llef. PROGRAMME / RHAGLEN Please refer to the Festival calendar for full details. Workshops must be booked in advance and each workshop followed for its full term (i.e. one, two, three or five days). Workshop places are generally allocated on a first-come-first-served basis, so please also indicate your second choice of workshop in case your first choice is already fully-subscribed. Free places are available for a disabled participant’s personal carer. Guide Dogs and Hearing Dogs are welcome. FESTIVAL TICKETS / TOCYNNAU’R WYL 1 DAY £65 (£45 unwaged) 2 DAYS £125 (£85 unwaged) 3 DAYS £185 (£125 unwaged) FULL FESTIVAL TICKETS: £300 (£200 unwaged) Full Festival Ticket includes all events, and is valid from the evening of Thursday 27 March to 4pm on Tuesday 1 April,3 Day, 2 Day and 1 Day Tickets include access to your workshop, the performance the evening before and the talk or lecture-demonstration either the day before or following on from the workshop - you choose. The workshops will run from 9.30am, with a break for lunch, until 3.30pm. The day continues with presentations between 4pm and 5.30pm, more presentations between 7pm and evening performances from 8.30pm. METHOD OF PAYMENT Please make cheques/ international money orders payable to CPR. Alternatively, we accept Visa, Mastercard, Delta, Solo and Switch. GIVING VOICE BURSARIES We offer two Giving Voice Bursaries in memory of Siwsann George and Venice Manley, both much-missed supporters and artist associates of Giving Voice. In addition, as an extension to the Helen Berhane Bursary offered at Giving Voice in 2006 to highlight her plight of incarceration (we are glad to report she has now been freed) – we offer a new bursary, a Giving Voice Freemuse Bursary, to highlight Freemuse and its Music Freedom Day on 3rd March. For these Bursaries, as with the Giving Voice Bursary Barter Scheme, please apply in writing for these bursaries, stating interest and reason for applying, to Giving Voice by 1st March 2008. (Note, applicants for the Siwsann George Bursary should be resident in Wales.) BURSARY BARTERS For applicants in particular financial hardship we are pleased to be able to offer a small number of discretionary bursary places in return for some practical assistance on the project. To apply for a bursary place, please write enclosing a brief C.V. and reason for applying. Closing date for bursary applications: 1st March 2008 Breath, Inspiration and the Voice Softly I shall speak to the air. The ears of man have become deaf with the sound of explosions. The eyes of man have become blind with tears. …The air into which I pour my heart shall permeate the hearts of Man. Pundit Acharya (1975) Breath, Sleep, the Heart and Life International Festival of the Voice in Performance Giving Voice 10: Breath Inspiration Voice 27th March – 2nd April 2008 Aberystwyth, Wales! Breath is fundamental to life but also to giving voice. As we take a new breath, as we inspire, we absorb the potential to express new thoughts, to give voice to feeling: to persuade, argue, seduce, analyse, lament, educate, sympathise… We can orate or berate, or wait - with bated breath - for the moment to exhale, the expressive breath. To express through the word or song, to sing with joy and warmth or from despair and terror: the song can be a narrative carried on the ever changing, yet rhythmic tides of the breath; the breath can fuel an outcry against the injustice of the world, the flames of fury fed by the heated lungs; a song of sorrow may be heard as the sobbing, broken intake of jagged air or as the extended wail of the bereft. In, out, and always an exchange, reciprocity, a flow, an exemplar of change. For the actor and for the singer the breath is a life long focus of attention. There is always something new to learn. The process of life: environment, anxiety, change, aging, illness – all these can affect breathing as well as professional demands of character, vocal range, size of auditorium, and so on. In some cultures the breath is talked of in terms of ‘management’ and ‘control’ but in others breath is ‘spirit’, ‘energy’, or even God. What can we learn from ancient practices and new understandings that emanate from neuroscience and biology? What can performers gain from considering philosophies that address the deeper relationship of breath to life? Might a cognisance of the latest scientific revelations gained through technological advance empower skill, technique and creativity? Giving Voice invites exponents of voice from a wide variety of cultures and areas of expertise to explore the relationship, tangents and nuances, between breath and voice, and that vital component, inspiration, in all its meanings and resonances. Focusing on the voice in performance, practitioners and scholars come together in practical explorations in an inspirational programme of workshops, lecture demonstrations and performances. How can a thought live? In what way does it live? Has it a body to live in, has it a mind, has it a breath? Hazrat Inayat Khan ( 1882-1927) The Mysticism of Sound and Music : The Sufi Teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan Breathing lies between the condition of the natural and the cultural. Breathing is a biological invariant, that is nevertheless capable of being subjected to significant forms of variation. All human beings breathe, all the time and involuntarily. But it is also possible to take control of our breathing, for the purposes of speech, song, and music, etc. If human history depends on language, and if language is interrupted breath, then our capacity to effect complex regulations of the breath lies at the bottom our humanity. Breathing is a both a symbol and enactment of the relationship between the inner and outer which constitutes us … …Inspiration is an interesting word, expressing a twofold operation: one is inspired, when one breathes in the breath that another has expired: up until the eighteenth century, to inspire can mean both to breathe in (the opposite of expiring): and to breathe simultaneously out from the body and into some other object, as, for example, a wind instrument. …breath is not merely transferable between beings, it is transfer or transfusion of being itself… Stephen Connor (1999) A Quick History of Breathing: notes for BBC Radio 4 feature The Kiss of Life The aim is a voice that listens, that perceives, that therefore can integrate itself into a contextual image. The working principle being that you can only ‘ex’ (give, express) what you have previously taken ‘in’. The quality of ‘receiving’ and ‘listening’ becomes crucial, prior. We are in the world of in-spiration, in terms of in-breath and inspiring before expiring, expressing, voicing. Voices are too often in a rush to produce, to fill time and space with the body of their expression. I sometimes insist on breathing in through the nose, not out of some technical preference, but because breathing in through the nose is slower, more sensitive and discriminatory than the mouth’s ‘gulping’ intakes. Inspirational listening becomes akin to the subtlety of scent. Enrique Pardo (2003) Figuring out the Voice: (Performance Research Journal, Volume 8, No 1, Voices) To live – to breathe: to become – to change/ alter. An appearing that is always different within an air that continuously offers itself as other. Luce Irigaray (1999) The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger The profound goal of the serious actor is to transform into other characters in performance…. As long as the actor’s breathing patterns are inflexibly held in habitual muscle usage, the hoped-for transformation will only be skin deep…the events that happen to the dramatic character must be experienced in the breathing process if that character is to be believed and his or her voice is to be authentic. Kristin Linklater (2006) Freeing the Natural Voice (revised and expanded) The babe, before he has submitted to discipline’s unnatural methods of development, breathes deeply, moving his abdomen more than his chest; because the diaphragm is superintending the normal function, and, when lowered, thrusts the viscera downward which distends the elastic muscles of the abdominal walls, and leaves the thorax above much enlarged for the full expansion of the lungs. Only thus can the lower lung-cells be filled or have their stagnant residue of air changed and renewed. As life exists only from breath to breath, he who but half breathes only half lives…. Ella Adelia Fletcher (1908) The Law of Rhythmic Breath Man breathes, but he does not breathe rightly. As the rain falls on the ground and matures little plants and makes the soil fertile, so the breath, the essence of all energy, falls as a rain on all parts of the body. This also happens in the case of the mind, but man cannot even perceive that part of the breath that quickens the mind; only that felt in the body is perceptible, and to the average man it is not even perceptible in the body... When we study the science of breath the first thing we notice is that breath is audible; it is a word in itself, for what we call a word is only a more pronounced utterance of breath fashioned by the mouth and tongue. In the capacity of the mouth breath becomes voice, and therefore the original condition of a word is breath. Therefore if we said: ‘First was the breath’, it would be the same as saying: ‘In the beginning was the word’… …Lifes’s mystery lies in the breath; it is the continuation of breath and pulsation that keeps the mechanism of the body going. …..The breath which one breathes is certainly a secret in itself; it is not only a secret but the expression of all mystery, something upon which the psychology of life depends. Hazrat Inayat Khan ( 1882-1927) The Mysticism of Sound and Music : The Sufi Teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan Additional information is available for download here: GIVING_VOICE_BOOKING_FORM_2008_2.doc, Giving_Voice_Brochure_final.pdf |
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