The Soul of Song

Exploration with Maud Robart
In ancient Africa, the essence of art was the celebration of life.
And what does it truly mean to celebrate life ?
This intimate and vital experience is explored through an appropriate approach to songs and movements drawn from the Afro-Haitian Rada repertoire. These traditional models, when fully embodied, have a transformative impact on our sensibilities, awakening us
to fresh, unfettered energies. In a burst of life, the natural flow of pure spontaneity reveals the inner dancing star in everyone, one's own creative essence.
The journey into the experience starts with the singer's fine listening. The transparent attention that they are paying to their inner perceptions, to the melodic and rhythmical precision... their interactions with the context thus become sensitive components
of the ongoing process.
A dynamic tension between rule and freedom moves the creative subject to surrender to the living forces of the songs, to flow into the source of life itself.

- Field of exploration

Based on oral transmission, this approach aims at regaining, through gentle induction, the innate unity of body and voice. The focus is on discovering the wave of the song. The wave itself requests this unity, expressing the inner energy of the song.

- Key elements

• Rhythmic sonorities and walking dances open themselves up to being experienced. They form the balanced foundations of this embodied singing practice, in which movement and song are inherently united

• Structures of collective action, carried by pulsation, generate a field of reciprocal relationships and thus make it possible to move while attuned to the listening of the same energy

• The session opens with a sequence alternating dynamic and rhythmic movements that awaken the body–mind into availability

-  Condition of Participation*

The exploration is open to anyone whose physical and psychological condition is appropriate, and who feels the need to engage, with full awareness, in a process of inquiry and artistic discovery.
Required skills:

• Sing in tune
• Keep repetitive rhythmical patterns in song and gesture alive over a period of time
• Expand the attention to embrace the totality of a given situation

NB*  

- The number of beginners is limited to 7 - 10
- At the end of the workshop, participants are not allowed to use, share, or publish the methodological and technical elements of the practice

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