"From Loss to Resonance: How Music and Movement Rekindled Alina's Voice"
The clients name has been change for the purpose of confidentiality
My work with Alina, a 25 -year-old professional dancer and musician, began when she sought help to navigate the significant emotional and physical changes caused by a neurological condition. This condition had profoundly altered her physical abilities, confining her to a wheelchair, and impacted her once vibrant voice. Alina's goal was to manage her grief and rediscover her passion for music, aiming to maintain her professional identity and personal joy in the face of adversity.
Alina came to me after experiencing a drastic shift in her ability to express herself vocally, a change that deeply affected both her professional life and personal identity. During our initial session, she spoke of her determination to find a new balance—a "middle way"—that would allow her to adapt to her changed circumstances without losing her essence. She was particularly motivated to rebuild her resilience and rekindle her love for music, having felt overlooked and unappreciated in her musical family due to her disability and her brother being favoured as the singer.
In response to Alina's needs, I introduced her to the concept of The Spherical Space'. This approach was specifically chosen to provide Alina with a sense of safety and non-judgment, critical for her vocal exploration, given her experiences of feeling unsafe and unappreciated in different spaces due to her wheelchair use and unclear verbalisation. The sphere, visualised by Alina as being filled with gold and crystals, represented a vibrant core of potential that she could tap into to enrich her ability to express and modulate her voice within new boundaries.
Within the sphere, Alina began by mapping out its boundaries with her hands, gaining an understanding of the psychological and emotional layers that made up her new vocal and physical space. As she vocalised within her mid-range, maintaining a flute-like quality with mild pitch fluctuations, I encouraged her to expand her vocal range. This exploration helped her to engage more deeply with the textures and dynamics of her voice, experimenting with volume and tone modulation.
Throughout our session, Alina found more space to sound herself, building upon the colour spectrum of her voice. This process was transformative, not just in terms of vocal recovery but also in mental and emotional healing. Her journey within the spherical space facilitated a broader recovery, tapping into her deep-seated resilience and rediscovering joy in her craft.
In another session Alina wanted to explore how she could express her voice in situations where she felt restricted. She mentioned that although she wasn't a singer, her family had a rich history of musical professionals.
I asked Alina to write about the theme "My Voice is..." where she was able to express how she viewed her voice in various situations, both positive and negative. She wrote down some words, which then became the basis for vocalising, first in her usual speaking voice. I then asked her to listen again to what she had written, so that she could hear what she had said. She read the lines again, this time exaggerating and amplifying their prosody, forming an expression midway between speech and song. This proved challenging as Alina's condition made it difficult to process the middle area between speech and melody. I finally asked Alina to sing the lines in full melody. Her voice adopted a more flute-like configuration, but she repeatedly sang the same melody. I suggested that she play with her voice using a spectrum of colours; however, it remained in one or two colors for the session.
As Alina and I began to piece together the story of her voice and how it sounds, we understood that her condition prevented one mode of expression from transitioning smoothly into another, and we began to see that music was a very powerful part of her route forward to use her voice and express herself more explicitly in the world. Looking further into Alinas connection to music, we discovered through exploration that she could speak with clear articulation in a clarinet vocal configuration without tiring or struggling. It was as if her mind and heart appreciated music so highly that it overrode the surrounding environment and gave her a clear line of vocal expression.
We continued our conversation with Alina using melody to freely communicate and continue telling her story. Her voice shifted from a heady sound to a warmer, lower body texture as she melodically spoke from her heart while holding her hand to her chest. She found it easier to close her eyes to speak, eliminating the distraction of too much information.
In a subsequent session Alina wanted to sing. She had found a new sense of connection to her lower body placement in her wheelchair. I wanted to work with Alina on breath work, helping her connect with the lower abdomen so she could tap into the gut instinct she had for her expression. She breathed well but with slow frequency and moderate volume. She would experience pain on the right side, so I asked her to vocalise in a Clarinet position in a Primate configuration, which was difficult to do in her wheelchair.
We decided she would work on the floor, which would allow Alina more ground contact and help her animate the positioning to breathe more fluidly. Alina created the Primate position on her side on the floor with a soft gaze and more emotive breathing. She played with the breath as I directed her towards feeling the sound coming from her coccyx bone, as if she had a tail. Her vocal breath became more animated as I asked her to add more cadence and notes across her range.
She freely played with this idea using extended vocal grunts, hoots, barks, and then moving more into a dance of improvised vocal jumps across her range, accompanied by myself singing with her to create a duet of vocalisation. We continued from this point into Alina accessing her breathing on her front as if she were a reptile, a crocodile with its mouth wide open. As she breathed, I got her to imagine the tube running all the way from the mouth to the rectum, which was open. She breathed deeply as she engaged more with the feeling of it. After this exploration, Alina felt freer in her placement when she returned to the chair. Her voice was now in a lower configuration in its harmonic timbre, which she expressed gave her a tidy connection to the base of her chair, which she had not experienced before. , I worked on the 10 vocal components to explore more of what could be added to her voice in terms of colour, form, and shape. I got Alina to work on nasality, pitch range, harmonic timbres of her voice, pitch fluctuation, onset, and free air. I asked Alina to choose a song that she had a connection with to use these ingredients and develop them further.
Alina started off with more of a flute configuration in her voice as she explored the melody of the song chosen but gradually, as she became more comfortable, her tone began to change and move into a clarinet configuration, which had warmth and power. She naturally used a fast pitch fluctuation in the voice, so I got her to explore no pitch fluctuation and slow fluctuation to broaden her tonal quality and see how it made her feel. We then progressed, expressing more of the melody in the room as it became more animated and stronger.
We looked at how the onset can empower the start of each note and free air to create variation in connectivity. After we had discovered the majority of these components, Alina explored the full range of her voice in loudness and dynamics, moving around the room with more speed and expressing a dynamic play of emotions and technique.
Having worked closely with Alina, I feel privileged to have witnessed her transformative healing journey. Her story highlights the paradoxical nature of healing, where confronting deep losses can lead to profound discoveries and renewed purpose. Inspired by Maya Angelou’s words, "You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated," Alina's experience underscores her unyielding spirit and the enduring power of human resilience and creativity. Her journey through music and therapy is a testament to the transformative power of confronting difficult emotions and working through them in a positive and constructive way.
