The workshop focuses on:

• unleashing the imagination, conjuring sonic imagery
• finding / fueling language real and imaginary
• locating resonances in the body, in the room
• using movement to thrust one into voicing, triggering memory,
• improvising with an expanded vocabulary that is authentic, all your own, stretching your instrument in unexpected ways in hopefully uncharted territory

Open for all levels, vocalists, musicians, actors, teachers, poets, sound artists, visual artists. Shelley Hirsch is an internationally renowned critically acclaimed vocalist, composer, “storyteller” and performance artist, whose performances, compositions, improvisations, sound installation, and collaborative works have been presented in clubs, concert halls, museums, galleries, theaters and on television and radio on 5 continents. “Going as far back as her childhood, Hirsch relentlessly mines her life experiences, concocting brilliant collage-like reminiscences that are alternately, and sometimes simultaneously, disquieting and euphoric. Embracing archetypal personas such as Blanche Dubois, she weaves their reinvented essences into the maze of associations conjured by her alchemical compositions. Investigating immediate consciousness, memory consciousness, and image-making consciousness, she becomes a producer of sonic images, recycling the discarded and the strange. Her remarkably unfettered access to the mother lode of automatism enhances her gift of spontaneous ingenuity.

“Hirsch’s command of extended vocal techniques imparts enormous variety to her music. The tone of her voice can range from audacious vulnerability, to charismatic intimacy (especially in the story-telling segments), to hallucinatory excursions floating effortlessly out of the spoken/sung voice and into pure Hirschian singing. Such transitions always remain viscerally connected to the text and in context.” From Anne LeBaron’s essay Surrealism in Post Modern Music (Garland Press) “Hirsch is a woman of 1000 Voices” “an extraordinary vocalist… enormously, inventive, scathingly satiric and virtuosic… A brilliant overwhelming presence on stage.” New York Times

Open to the public and free of charge. The number of places for the workshop that follows the presentation is limited to 15 participants. The workshop will last till about 9 PM. Organized by Školská 28 Gallery in cooperation with the Agosto Foundation.