May 04 2024 to May 04 2024 10:30 a.m.

Price: Rs 2799 Book/Buy

Where

Buffalo Back

43, Mountain Street, 1st Block East, Jayanagar, Bengaluru 560011

Event Description

There is a false myth that there are good voices and bad voices. Folk voice lab was born out of a necessity to break this myth. Voice box is a muscle, an instrument. It can be trained to sing the songs that are inside all of us. While singing with hundreds of people in Cubbon Park, we realised the power of harnessing the energy of singing together, as a collective. This workshop looks at finding your voice, as an anatomical source of music but also as a socio-cultural medium of embodied generational experiences. Folk voice lab is not a workshop but a space to understand our possibilities and limitations. The structure of this session resonates with the ethos of our work. This full day session is divided into three sections- Inside out, Bridge and Flow. The first section is a diagnostic exploration of one's own voice,both inside and outside, understanding not just the anatomy and dynamics of our voice, but also the mental barriers we must cross. The second section is divided to facilitate listening in the truest sense by understanding the biological and psychological limitations. In this section, we look at our body's ability to detect patterns, find our personal lacunae and work towards correcting them. Both of these sections flow into the final section, Flow, which tries to understand our voices as a collective entity in socio-cultural context. We learn folk songs as a lens to understand our generational memories and social movements and in this process, try to break the hierarchies of caste, class, and gender imposed on our voices. One's voice is elastic, malleable and full of wondrous surprises. We hope at the end of this lab, participants walk out empowered to find their voice, whether it is a mother singing a lullaby to her child a researcher looking to understand oral traditions or someone just singing a song to soothe their heart on a tumultuous day.

About Shilpa Mudbi

Shilpa Mudbi Kothakota is an artist currently living in Kalaburgi. Born and brought up in Bangalore, she graduated in Media Arts and Production from Sydney, Australia. She has been in the field of social justice as a social activist and media consultant with NGOs working on youth, women and child rights. She taught Documentary filmmaking at Mount Carmel College and has worked at Ranga Shankara Theatre Bangalore as a Program Coordinator. She is the Co-founder of Urban Folk Project, a collective that looks at the collating of folk knowledge systems of North Karnataka. She has been a Karnataka Janapada Academy member for three years 2019 to 2022. She is currently on the Academic Advisory Committee of the IGNCA, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, Bangalore.

About Workshop

A full day session is divided into 3 sections. The first section is a diagnostic exploration of one’s voice to understand the anatomy and dynamics of our voice, along with the mental barriers we must address. The second section is divided to facilitate listening in the truest sense by understanding the biological and psychological limitations. Both of these sections flow into the final section, which tries to understand our voices as a collective entity in the socio-cultural context. We learn folk songs as a lens to understand our generational memories and their social, cultural and political context. Shilpa Mudbi will be conducting this one day intensive to help you start, restart and reclaim your journey with your ‘voice’. Each participant will have an online session of an hour at a later date convenient to go over concepts, troubleshoot and discuss individually.