Location
London
London
Circlesinging and Collaborative Vocal Improvisation. Global music, Jazz and Latin American music.
Facilitating collective singing, encouraging everyone and helping people to reclaim their innate right to sing and musicality are my biggest passions. I offer Circu-tribe Experience workshops for any Natural Voice choir or singing group keen to explore Circlesinging, and regular Laboratories and trainings for choir leaders interested in sharing Circlesongs and other forms of vocal improvisation.
Being a collaborative vocal improviser and circlesong leader encompasses my passion for music and community and brings together all the strands of my musical history and spirit. I feel blessed to have been practising these forms with amazing singers around the world and to be leading circlesongs and teaching others vocal improvisation for the last 10 years.
It’s been more than 25 years since I started back in Buenos Aires, and every day I am grateful for the opportunity of doing this job. Each encounter with a group is a unique and new experience. I enjoy the safe space, the magic and mystery that can unfold whenever I stand in front of a group of singers and we begin to make music together.
I intend to offer myself, my musical background and all that I have learned and cultivated throughout these years to other singers. My wish is that it might inspire and encourage them to enjoy their voices and musical imaginations fully, to grow, share, connect and discover each other through sound, to play and explore beyond their familiar territory.
I’d like to acknowledge and thank spiritual mentor John Oakley and yoga teacher and changemaker Judith Seelig for their presence in my life, support and ongoing inspiration. I’m also grateful to all my previous teachers, especially Iris Guinazu, Julio Raggio, Daniel Suarez Marzal and many others I encountered in Argentina and the UK, and more recently for having had the opportunity to learn from Bobby McFerrin and Rhiannon, two of the world’s greatest vocal improvisers.
I’ve been a keen vocal improviser since my beginnings as a jazz singer back in Buenos Aires in the 1990’s. I was fascinated by scat and studied Ella Fitzgerald, Jon Hendricks, Mark Murphy, Sheila Jordan and others. I saw Bobby McFerrin live in Buenos Aires in the 90’s and was blown away by how simply and seamlessly he included the audience in his performance.
After moving to the UK, and without making any conscious connection with Bobby’s work, I began using circlesongs and experimenting with them intuitively since 2001 as a workshop leader. Every session I would make up songs using invented language and interlocking parts as a warmup for community choirs, and sometimes I would also create more complex musical structures ‘in the moment’ as they enabled me to share the Latin American flavour and grooves without asking people to memorise long songs in Spanish.
But it was only after having the privilege of meeting and working with Bobby and other great vocal improvisers and teachers such as Rhiannon from 2011 that I realised that Circlesinging and Collaborative Vocal Improvisation (CVI) were recognised as an artform and started to practise them, acquiring new skills and eventually began to offer circlesinging and CVI workshops.
Since then, I have led and been part of many circlesinging courses and retreats in the UK and across Europe, mostly as a facilitator but also as a host and a participant, and I am excited at the potential for ongoing learning, growing and sharing.
My work is informed by an open question: did early humans sing before they could speak? This has led me to explore many ways into spontaneous collective song without the use of language.
