If you were born healthy, the first thing you did was scream hello into your new startled self. Every need of yours was a cry. Singing was how you stayed alive. Here’s what we know in this cult: singing IS how you can still stay alive.
You learned words. Words for everything. Toys, friends, feelings, the future. Words for things you believed you could and could not be. You meowed at your cat, stubbed your toe on the leg of the table and howled, looked your father in the eyes and said something that wasn’t true. You finally told that person you loved them, and they said they didn’t love you back in the same way, and you walked away with your mouth closed. You learned French. You had that mind blowing divine orgasm where you made noises that sounded like creatures from another galaxy. You nearly died – the time the taxi almost hit you and you screamed WHAT THE FUCK at the top of your lungs and all of NYC went silent for one millionth of a second due to the awesome anger of your survival instinct channeled into sound waves. In your voice is every word you have spoken with disdain about other people, and anything you’ve ever said that eased just a little bit of another person’s pain. All those lines of Shakespeare and Walt Whitman that you learned to recite. The Lady Gaga lyrics, the Johann Sebastian Bach that bloomed in your mouth like roses. The things you said this morning to yourself alone in the bathroom. The time that the worst thing in the world happened to you, and you stopped speaking for six months.
It’s all in there, the data of how you walk through the world, how you make your will known, the things you love aloud and the unvoiced things you fear.
So today we are here first to take stock, to take an inventory of what is in there.
If you had to count them and stack them up in rows, how many yeses, how many no’s has it said? How many times has it said “sorry” and how many times has it said “I forgive you?”
How much have you loved how it sounds? How much have you hated it? How many times has it gone hoarse, or given up completely?
At Voice Cult we know that when we open our mouths to say anything at all – even aah (SAY AHHH) – we are containing sounding we have ever said, and everything we ever will say – all past, present, and future selves vibrating in one present wave.
Can you make a list of all the things you haven’t yet said in your life but need to say?
Your voice that summoned you here today has one question for you: What are you calling forward?
Let’s find out.
———————
WARMUP
there’s no wrong way to do this… just go with me.
make a sound that you make at least once a day.
make a sound that is almost like your favorite word.
make a sound that comes from the beak of your favorite bird.
make a sound that you have never ever ever made before.
make a sound that is tender.
make a sound that is blue.
make a sound that has a spike running through it.
make a sound that is covered in honey.
make a sound of an animal hasn’t been born yet.
make a sound of being underwater.
make a sound that reanimates the bones of a dinosaur.
make a sound that is funny to nobody else but you.
make a sound that will ask a flower to blossom.
make a sound that contains the courage of your ancestral lineage.
make a sound of remembering most loving thing you’ve ever done.
make a sound of your childhood house.
make a sound that exists 20 million years in the future.
make a sound of another version of yourself singing in an alternate reality.
make a sound that only ghosts can hear.
make a sound for the departed soul of Prince.
make a sound that turns you on sexually.
make a sound that renders you invisible.
make a sound that makes you feel completely safe.
Think again about all the sounds you haven’t yet said in your life that you need to say. Make a mental list of them. What is at the top of that list?
Whatever is at the top of that list, make it into a sound.
Turn that sound into a made-up word.