You can give your voice time to become a subject of exploration. You listen, make sound, move, and discover what changes. The Banff Centre’s history and Richard Armstrong’s International Voice Workshops show how intensive artistic study has brought performers and teachers together. Its importance here lies in the relationship between focused training, artistic experiment, and the work you carry back into performance.
From a drama course to an arts centre
Banff’s institutional history began in 1933 with a drama course established by the University of Alberta’s Department of Extension. Creative writing, playwriting, painting, music, and further disciplines followed. In 1935 the institution became the Banff School of Fine Arts. Its later development expanded the possibilities for artists to study and make work in concentrated periods.
The history includes the Eric Harvie Theatre’s opening in 1967, the institution’s autonomy as a non-degree granting educational centre in 1978, and the introduction of a Music Theatre Studio Ensemble in 1981. The name Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity arrived in 2016. Those changes help you understand an institution whose work crosses training, artistic development, and presentation.
For your own education, that model raises a useful question: what can you investigate when the immediate subject is the development of your artistic resources? You may bring substantial experience and still need time to reconsider a habit, encounter unfamiliar work, or hear your own material differently. An intensive period of study can concentrate that inquiry.
Richard Armstrong’s voice workshops
Within Banff’s larger history, you find Richard Armstrong’s International Voice Workshops, which his biography records as part of the Centre’s curriculum for more than thirty years. Armstrong’s work connects the voice with the body and imagination. Through his teaching statement, you encounter an approach attentive to the expressive character of sound and to the person making it.
You can ask what a sound is doing as well as whether it matches an expected finish. Its color may suggest a character. Its rhythm may carry a form of thought. Its weight or delicacy may change the relationship to a listener. These observations belong to artistic interpretation. They give you material to explore in performance without requiring a single explanation of what a sound means.
Armstrong describes individual and group work, attention to breath and physical grounding, and the exploration of range, resonance, dynamics, repertoire, and imagination. He also describes improvisation with scenes, songs, text, and space. The relationship between those elements matters: vocal work can become a way of developing material as well as preparing to perform existing material.
Your sound as dramatic material
What changes when you stop judging every sound by the same ideal? You can begin to hear more distinctions. A light tone might be playful in one scene and evasive in another. A rougher texture might belong to a particular character or musical language. A sustained vowel can make you aware of a thought’s duration. The expressive value depends on the artistic context and your relationship to it.
That inquiry asks for discrimination. Variety becomes useful when you can hear differences and choose among them. You may discover a sound that is striking in isolation but wrong for a lyric. You may find a quieter choice that carries more of the scene. Exploration gives you possibilities; your developing craft helps you recognize where each possibility belongs.
Armstrong’s teaching statement also addresses work with composers developing new forms of vocal expression. You can see why the performing voice may become part of composition itself. A composer encounters a particular sound and has to consider how to shape it, repeat it, or notate it. Your resources as a performer can therefore affect the material being written.
What continues after an intensive
A workshop gives you concentrated experiences. Their artistic use often becomes clearer later, when you return to a score, a role, or your regular practice. You may recognize that a passage asks for more range of character than you had previously allowed. You may hear a new relationship between a phrase and the physical action beneath it. The work continues through those encounters.
Keep the distinctions specific. What did you hear? What changed when the music, text, or movement changed? What can you return to reliably? Clear observations help you develop an artistic practice from an experience. They also leave room for a discovery to take a different form in your next piece.
Jason Bennett’s study at Banff
At JBAS, you study with Jason Bennett, who completed the Advanced International Voice Workshop at the Banff Centre twice with Richard Armstrong. You encounter the Roy Hart voice lineage through Jason Bennett’s study with Armstrong and Jonathan Hart Makwaia. That history belongs to his continuing work with acting, singing, movement, and imagination.
Continue through Instrument, Archetype Work, and Acting process. Your voice becomes richer artistic material as your listening becomes more exact and your choices more responsive to the work.
Source for further study: Richard Armstrong’s teaching statement.
