This is a class I offer to play with the inner feeling of rhythm in relationship with movement and our bodies.
Body percussion offers wonderful benefits regarding the body-mind connection, our perception of our body in space, coordination, and balance. It also has quite an incredible energising effect and helps bring a smile to our hearts in most situations!
Depending on what the situation requires and the requests of the participants for each specific class, I mostly follow two approaches:
Use body percussion with the support of spoken rhythmical syllables: this allows the brain to process rhythm both through movement of the limbs, and though the powerful impact of the spoken voice.
Use body percussion together with simple songs and polyphonies to experience a stronger emotional bound to the rhythms we have discovered and practised, and thus reinforcing the quality of the integration process.
For groups of students specifically interested in the dancing aspect in relation to rhythm, I also teach the basics of relaxed styles of Irish and Appalachian tap dance, often called Sean Nos or Flatfooting. These styles can be practiced without specific shoes and can offer the freedom to improvise by just learning very few basic components, before exploring various and infinite ways to put them together!
3 main teaching formats:
1 - Stand alone 2 to 5 hours workshop to discover new ways to feel and play with rhythm
Discover a new way to perceive rhythm, to link it to body movements and the voice, through application on simple world's traditional rhythms, songs and games.
2 - Weekend workshops
Establish the building blocks of how to speak the languages of rhythm and apply body movement to further integrate these concepts.
3 - Workshops combining the use of body percussion with the development of vocal technique and/or polyphonic singing
After years of working on vocal technique and facing many walls in my progression, I noted that the general physical and mental activation that body percussion brings to us tends to benefit singing in a subtle yet deep way. The coordination of the voice, breathing, and posture muscles slightly improves during and after the practice of body percussion, which allows for the space to create a more efficient vocal technique on an unconscious level. Moreover, the rhythmical clarity brought by the practice of body percussion helps with creating a very clear inner image of the music we want to sing, making the intention more vivid and thus helping bringing a very polished link between the inner intention and the actual voice production mechanism.
In practice:
- Learning a repertoire of simple body percussion patterns to heighten our rhythmic sensitivity and creativity.
- Create poly-rythms based on various world's musical traditions, and build a relationship between these polyrhythms and harmony.
- A shared repertoire of simple folk songs, with a gradually increasing complexity in the body percussion rhythms used in the arrangements.
- Basic vocal technique.
- Games to understand and speak the language of music, between rhythm, melodies, chords and harmony.
Goals:
- Master the most commonly used notions of rhythm and be able to improvise, compose or play with it.
- Create a repertoire of simple songs and gradually develop more ambitious arrangements, using the power of games and our understanding of the musical language.
For whom is this course?
Each class can focus on different subjects, and therefore might be a good fit from different levels.
For complete beginners > starting to recognise, visualise rhythm, then play with our first poly-rhythms, introduce variation and improvisation.
For experienced musicians and singers > we play with the interlocking of harmony and poly-rhythm, advanced body percussion, more challenging games and repertoire...
It can also be useful for musicians who already play an instrument and want to get deeper into their discovery of the musical language through the use of the singing and movement in a polyphonic context. This to develop more freedom in expressing themselves through music with their instruments and voice.