Experimental Voice Work – Embodied Writing
Explore and experiment with your voice as an instrument and develop new forms of embodied writing and performance.
This practice-based workshop will explore the many ways we might activate and experience our voice, both as a physical organ and philosophical concept of expression and sensation across multiple mediums (including writing, performance, video, sound, sign language, creative captions, audio description). Firmly rooted in a studio environment of experimentation, play, and curiosity, the workshop will draw on theoretical texts about the voice as much as on embodied techniques, based on Feldenkrais, Deep Listening, the Lichtenberger® Method for Applied Physiology of the Voice, Gaga, Body-Mind-Centring. This combined somatic approach foregrounds highly differentiated sensory perception and accessible and imaginative prompts rather than any strict technique.
Each practical experiment will also be paired with a group analysis of literary and art historical examples of voice work. No background in music, dance, or performance is necessary, and anyone is welcome—the gathering will be of interest to anyone who wants to take their writing and art practice to a new level by enlivening their imagination and grounding their work in embodied experience. The prompts and imagery used will be open-ended, poetic, playful, sensory, inclusive, and can be adapted to any body, any mind, and any mood.
Importantly, the prompts for singing, humming, sound-making, movement, and gesture will serve as launching pads for your own creative journey, which could take the forms of poems, drawings, art writing, performance, sound pieces, or hybrid forms.
1 x full day session, running 10.30am–4.30pm (GMT), on 19 Oct 2024. This course will take place at The Poetry Cafe, 22 Betterton St, London WC2H 9BX.
To apply for a concession rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]. Conditions of eligibility are detailed here. More information about how our In-Person Courses work can be found on the In-Person Courses page. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected].
Image credit: @g0ldfishhead
About Sophie Seita 
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The workshop arises out of Sophie Seita’s current artist research project Touching Language, which explores experimental queer writing in and as performance in the visual arts, through collaborative research, multi-sensory practice, creative access, and pedagogical experiments.
Sophie Seita is a London-based artist and researcher whose work swims in the muddy waters of language and is informed by deep listening, critical opacity, queer abstraction, and a playfulness that’s both rigorous and pleasurable. Often working with others across disciplines, she’s expanding and deepening her ongoing intersectional queer collaboration with the musician and conductor Naomi Woo, to give voice to untold queer archives, as part of The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions. Most recently, this took the form of a fictional gardening talk show called bingenTV; a solo exhibition at Mimosa House; a zine called The Minutes; and a multi-layered encounter in the wetlands of Xochimilco, Mexico City, in collaboration with the organisation Ruta del Castor, the artist Carolina Caycedo, and numerous international artists, activists, farmers, and researchers. Seita teaches in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, and currently holds the 2023-2024 Werner Düttmann Fellowship at Akademie der Künste, Berlin, where she is developing a series of graphic scores and textile pieces. Her latest book is Lessons of Decal, a collection of experimental essays, out now with the 87 Press.
"I find the quality of teaching at the Poetry School is outstanding: there hasn't been a workshop I have participated in where I wasn't glad to have received the opportunity and the insights it offered."
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