While the daily work of music performers involves exercising expressive skills to be able to reach and transform their audiences emotionally, the pedagogical and professional contexts they work in typically disregard the crucial role their own felt experiences and emotions play in shaping their artistry and identity as musicians. A detrimental consequence of this situation is that the felt dimension of being a musician disappears from the routine discourses performers engage with, hindering the development of their emotional literacy. Both pedagogical and healthcare interventions are typically limited to cognitive, analytical and mechanical approaches, which neglect the affective and embodied dimension of performers’ lived experiences, thereby contributing to the problems artists face rather than to the solutions they need.
Professor Mine Doğantan-Dack, pianist and musicologist, and Monia Brizzi, chartered existential psychologist and IUR Head of Psychology, are running a workshop with an innovative framework aligned with the recent developments in performing arts research that have identified somatic and affective dimensions of subjective, personal experience as the foundation of not only performance and artistic expertise but also of enjoyment and fulfilment as performing artists.
During this workshop, we aim to welcome all aspects of music performers’ felt and embodied experiences (physical, mental, emotional, relational) in order to guide them to reconnect with and articulate the felt, unspoken, and pre-conceptual dimensions of their artistic activities. Together, we will explore what is in a lived experience, and how it can be communicated.
Join us for this very personal, and relational, journey to redeem the implicit critical knowledge of your musician-body and re-discover and unlock the motivation, commitment, presence, transcendence, and joy that will allow you to bring your whole self to your music making.
This workshop aims to:
Challenge the false separation of biomedical and psychosocial dimensions of musicians’ lived experiences;
Expose negative stereotypes about subjective and emotional experience perpetuated by western classical music pedagogies, leading to stigma, marginalisation and silencing;
Restore the wholeness and inseparability of body-mind, and affirm musicians’ own agency, will and self-efficacy;
Motivate and encourage the articulation and communication of the subtle, vague, and elusive aspects of your felt experiences as musicians.
Date and time: Wednesday 2 April 2025 11.00am to 1.00pm
Location: Peregrine’s Pianos, 137A Grays Inn Road, London WC1X 8TU
Book tickets here.