Trish Watts has spent the past two years in Cambodia bringing song to people hardened by war experience, hoping to once again give them a voice.
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Now the Sydney-based voice specialist is headed to Newcastle, for a one-day workshop she hopes will help people of the Hunter find confidence and freedom in singing.
The workshop, The Singing Voice, will be staged at Adamstown Uniting Church on June 3 and is for singers of all levels, aged 18 years and over.
Ms Watts said all singers at some point can experience debilitating tension when they sing for a variety of reasons.
“I love working with people to help them embody their voices, because the voice is a very powerful way of connecting and speaking our truth and expression,” Watts said.
“People often get divided between the body and the head and it gets stuck around the neck … we call that the Bermuda triangle, where the voice gets lost.
“I like helping people find confidence in their body, to stand up in their voices.”
Watts is a singing teacher, a singer and published songwriter.
She described being part of the not-for-profit organisation Cambodia Sings for the past two years as “amazing”.
There, the Sydney-based Watts, mainly worked with kids in slums and “kids that would not have access to joy in this way”.
“That’s really about helping young people and families find their voice,” she said.
“In Cambodia, to speak or to sing, it could lose your life or you could be punished, so there’s a lot of fear around the voice and about having a voice.
“Ninety per cent of the musicians were killed during the war, all of the mentors have gone, they’re really starved for a way of expressing.
“One of the things I remember is this story of a 21-year-old who said to me, ‘I come to choir every week because it’s my freedom, singing in this safe place is my freedom’.”
It struck a chord with Watts.
“Having safe spaces where people feel they can try things out, where they don’t have to get it right and it doesn’t have to be perfect, it’s something more organic than that,” she said.
“It about being able to have the full range of what your voice can do and singing is such a fabulous way to access that, the full emotion and power.”
Watts is registered with the International Association of Voice Movement Therapists.
For more on the workshop: 4961 5955.
