BVA ARCHIVE: Choice for Voice 2008; 10, 11 and 12 July
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Day 2 Report
by Liza Hobbs
I am a singing teacher/performer and came to the BVA conference as a new member and brim with curiosity. There were moments when I felt like a spoilt child with an over-full toy box, and in danger of losing my selective powers. There were others when I got a bit frustrated and cross, but more on that later. The overall sensation was one of enjoyment, and admiration for the unsung heroes who do all the back-room work that usually goes unnoticed (...until something goes wrong, that is).
Choice was the order of the day, and I made several good ones, some not so good, and not always for the expected reasons. Sometimes I felt faced with deciding between three or more alternatives none of which fired me, - and came away inspired! One choice was made on the grounds that I had just met the person taking the class and liked the way she talked about her work – that one was a good one. Another was made on the grounds that it was a medical problem that I kept coming up against in my work – and that was a bad one for the simple reason that the spoken delivery was appalling, the use of Power Point (which is surely meant to enhance a presentation?) was distracting, unhelpful and using such small print that it was barely readable from the 3rd row. In one sense the most inspiring insight came from (for me) an unexpected quarter. M Seipelt (below right) and his team from Frankfurt reported on a Wagnerian singer who had been injured by a blow to the neck in Karate which caused not only the expected pain but also a considerable loss of range and volume in his voice.
On thorough examination he and his ENT team could find nothing that might be causing this, and so handed him over to colleagues who eventually treated the singer to almost complete recovery through manual therapy of almost the entire body and not simply the immediate area of the injury. I thought this a shining example of interdisciplinary co-operation and mutual respect, and a beautiful metaphor for what the British Voice Association seems so good at doing.
So, what were the highlights for me? Peaceful moments in Sheila Gordon’s interesting workshop on The Tactile Voice; very nearly, at long last, getting to grips with exactly what the "singer’s formant" is in Ron Scherer’s excellently clear Plenary Workshop (I’ll get there one day), watching Lynne Wayman’s class trying to impersonate an audience at a rock concert in an effort to make her rock singer feel at home (he succeeded better than we deserved!), rock singer getting to grips with tongue! and the glorious sung contributions from the young people on the Royal Academy of Music Post Graduate Musical Theatre course which brought the day to such an enjoyable ending.
And, as a final comment, despite the fact that the conference was somehow wedged into the spaces allotted by an apparently already busy Guildhall/Barbican, in a building complex in which it is famously easy to get lost, we were at all times expertly directed and beautifully looked after.
Top left: Peak Woo, plenary speaker. Middle right: M Seipelt
Above left: Lynne Wayman and delegate. Above right: Sheila Gordon’s workshop "The Tactile Voice"
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