CVI (collaborative vocal improvisation) is a new artform. Many have stumbled upon how transformative it can be, and how it can help to heal personal, and perhaps even intergenerational or collective wounding and trauma.
On 18th September I’m honoured to be joined by Nessi Gomes, Anita Lewis, Marcia Willis, Melissa James and Conor O’Brien to discuss, from their direct experience and from their perspectives of therapeutic expertise, how it might be that singing, and particularly improvised singing, can support healing perhaps in some different ways to other therapeutic modalities.
Nessi Gomes is a musician and group facilitator with a BA (Hons) in Creative Expressive Therapies in Music and a certified Holistic Voice Therapist with The British Academy of Sound Therapy (BAST) in Group Voice Therapy. She teaches Vocal Odyssey courses which are transformational, and her first album, Diamonds and Demons won her Best of British Unsigned Female Artists in that year.
Marcia Willis is a vocal improviser and psychiatrist, with professional and personal experience of these different paradigms of healing.
Conor O'Brien is a Music Therapist who did his graduate dissertation on the therapeutic aspects of CVI (Collaborative Vocal Improvisation). His literature review revealed that there was no literature at all on the subject, and his dissertation may be the first.
Anita Lewis is a Cranial Sacral practitioner who guides body focused trauma-informed practices that restore connection and resilience for personal and collective deep system health. She's also a cracking vocal improviser and has witnessed, participated in and supported deep healing work using CVI.
Valentina Levchenko is a singer, improviser, composer, and community leader from Eastern Ukraine. She built a successful business career in Ukraine that she left to follow her dream of being a musician. She studied under Rhiannon's and Bobby McFerrin's patronage and explored different music techniques in the U.S. Canada, and Brazil. In 2019, her music journey brought her to Brazil where she released her first album Berehy which became one of the top 10 Indie albums of the year in Ukraine. Valentina created Kyiv Community Choir and became a TEDx Kyiv Speaker. She put her spin into organizing music camps in the Ukraine to help non-professional singers learn to overcome the fear of singing and accept their own culture.
We ask for £5 - £15 sliding scale to support the production team and the speakers.
How it works
We gather on zoom and settle in together (please try to be on time). We'll listen to some music, the speakers will speak for about 5 mins each, then we'll open the conversation to everyone. At various points we'll Call off the Thought and Sing, using voice to digest the emotions raised by the conversation. We'll mostly be on mute, but hopefully some of you will come off mute sometimes. From time to time we have a guest musician. We'll practice plurality (hold space for divergent view points), communicate respectfully, and make sense of our world together in a held space.
Hosted by Briony Greenhill, a folk-soul improvisational artist and international teacher of CVI (collaborative vocal improvisation). She's a qualified SomaSource leader - a psycho-spiritual educator, artist, activist and healer who has an integrated understanding of how to creatively work in developmentally attuned ways with diverse people throughout life’s cycles. She also has a 1st class degree in Political Science and worked in think tanks and social change organisations through her 20s. Her work is intimate and political, and in service to regenerative culture and paradigm shift, and healing what is torn in the world.
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