Skip to content

ARRAY’S 50th:
PUBLIC WORKSHOPS –
BREATH / VOICE / TEXTURE with FIDES KRUCKER

  • Live in the Arrayspace. Dates and times below

APRIL 15: 3 PM – 6 PM
APRIL 16: 3 PM – 6 PM
APRIL 29: 3 PM – 6 PM
APRIL 30: 12 PM – 3 PM

Class limit 10-12 participants

IMPORTANT: These classes are not single session drop-ins.

The full 4 classes are designed as a series to unfold vocal awareness and development with rigour and safety. (Please speak to Fides if there is any issue with taking all four classes.) 

CONCERT: April 23: 5PM 
w/ Fides Krucker (voice)
Rob Clutton (bass)
Tania Gill (piano)
Isabelle Noël (soundscapes)

BREATH / VOICE / TEXTURE

Open your voice through breath and resonance to an array of expressive textures. (Four 3-hour classes)

Using body-based, group and duo frames, Fides Krucker will introduce you to a vocal lexicon that includes multi-phonics — e.g. growls and shrieks — as well as peeps, and airy and clean tones through various ranges in your voice. 

Each student will work within their body’s capacity in a safe and organic way and can expect their connection to their own voice to expand regardless of their ability at the start of the series. 

This series is intended for the committed singer, musician and/or composer – and supports any musical genre. 

The first two classes will focus on breath and voice basics.

The third and fourth classes will continue textural exploration through improvisation and, if time permits, musicians can bring instruments into the mix.

VOICE & BREATH BASICS

Saturday, APRIL 15: 3 PM – 6 PM
Sunday, APRIL 16: 3 PM – 6 PM

VOICE AS INSTRUMENT + VOICE AND INSTRUMENT

Saturday, APRIL 29: 3 PM – 6 PM
Sunday, APRIL 29: 4 PM – 7 PM

Fides will give a concert on April 23rd at 5PM with musicians Rob Clutton (bass), Tania Gill (piano) and Isabelle Noël (soundscapes.)

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP INSTRUCTOR – FIDES KRUCKER

Fides Krucker has sung, produced and created contemporary opera and interdisciplinary work in Canada and abroad for forty years. She is an avant guard singer & radical voice teacher. Her book Reclaiming Calliope: Freeing the Female Voice through Undomesticated Singing (North Atlantic Books) re-wilds the human voice through body-based emotional integration. 

In 1991 Fides founded the interdisciplinary performance ensemble URGE; their final work received two Dora awards and was published by Playwrights Canada in 2016. Her company, Good Hair Day Productions, is known for groundbreaking lyric-theatre: Girl With No Door On Her Mouth (Bartley/Carson); CP Salon, an R&B love and disability show with Kazumi Tsuruoka, now an NFB film; Julie Sits Waiting (Dufort/Walmsley), a sexual catastrophe, electroacoustic opera nominated for five Doras; and In This Body, a collection of Canadian songs amplified through dance (Baker/Lemieux/Strauss). It premiered at Canadian Stage in 2018 and, in place of its cancelled 2020 tour, four of the songs have been made into four short films using Northern Ontario as backdrop.

Fides has collaborated extensively with Peggy Baker Dance Projects composing vocal scores for herself and the company’s dancers for land/body/breath (at the AGO and National Gallery), locus plot and most recently, phase space—for which she received a composition award. Her vocal creation for Erica Mott Productions’ 3Singers was praised for its “feminist jolt,” “avant garde sensibility” and “heartbreaking descant” in the Chicago Tribune. She has had a six year collaborative relationship with that city’s interdisciplinary, devised ensemble Walkabout Theater. In 2015 she co-created vocal lines and sang like a mermaid for both the theatre production and recording of DIVE (Beeson/Sanger.) In 2018 she released several CDs including In This Body (with Rob Clutton, Tania Gill and Germaine Liu), Maurizio Squillante’s electroacoustic opera Wings of Daedalus and Vanishing with Philadelphia improvisational guitarist Tim Motzer. On the latter her voice was noted for its “staggering range and control. Krucker’s voice is less an instrument than a force of nature.” Her recent recording of Berio’s Folk Songs on Vancouver’s Turning Point Ensemble’s Orlando release Curio Box was noted for its “blazing theatricality and playful brilliance.”

In the fall of 2018 Fides directed the premiere of choreographer Louis Laberge-Coté’s interdisciplinary dance work The art of degeneration at the Citadel in Toronto and was the Walker Cultural Leader at Brock University. She directed choreographer Jessica Runge’s Uncollected Works (2019) and Becoming (2022) and Con Queso’s Diabla Divina for Aluna’s Caminos Festival (2019) and during the pandemic transformed it into a radio play. Fides premiered her most recent concert piece, Sophrosyne, with Tania Gill in April 2021 for the Women from Space’s online holobox festival. 

Fides received a Paul D. Fleck Fellowship from the Banff Centre and was nominated for the K.M. Hunter award for music — both in the early 2000s — and the first draft of her book was supported by a Chalmers Foundation Fellowship in 2011. Her essays have been commissioned  by Descant, ECW, POIESIS, and the Canadian Theatre Review. 

Fides taught voice at Humber College for twenty years and facilitates a wide range of artists in Canada and the US. Her two-year teacher training programme launched in the summer of 2021 and the second cohort will begin in 2023. For more information and to read Fides’s writing please visit fideskrucker.com