A series of events about Performing Arts Medicine with particular attention to voice. Events will occur in person in Hong Kong but can be attended online. They can be purchased separately one by one or with a discounted combo.

Complete course program:

“VOCAL FIRST AID” – Seminar/Workshop
December 7th and 8th, 2024
10 am – 6 pm (venue: TBC)

Course description:
How can you recognize a voice issue while on stage or in the dressing room?
What do you need to know, and be able to do, to proceed with self-treatment?
What is the approach to providing first aid to the voice on stage or in the backstage?
What are the “cheapest” and most ergonomic ways to do (and read) a spectrogram in urgency to perform a translational analysis of the voice?
How to use eyes, ears, hands and brain for vocal first aid?
What are the reasons why drugs should never be prescribed or recommended?
How and when should you contact your doctor or a health care provider?
Who are the voice clinicians? What involves their job and in what ways do they work in the world?

These are just some of the topics on which “Vocal First Aid” will focus. This theoretical-practical course is designed to train instructors and artists in understanding the anatomo-physio-phatology of advanced vocal function, as well as the apparatus involved in the main performing arts, to manage first aid on stage.

“PAM – Performing Arts Medicine: What is it?
How can it help performers, teachers and therapists?” – Seminar/interview
December 8th, 2024
7 pm – 9 pm (Venue: TBC)

Course description:
Performing Arts Medicine is a branch of the official Medicine, and represents an inter-disciplinary field (not only multi-disciplinary). Although the name may be misleading, it concerns not only doctors, but also involves other figures in the arts and humanities.

The workshop will present the PAM in its two meanings, American and Italian, apparently very different but, if you are not hasty to draw conclusions, full of possible commonalities.

An adequate overview will provide the explanation of what are the bases of prevention, diagnosis, therapy and rehabilitation of diseases which affect performative arts professionals (actors, dancers, singers, circus performers, voice actors, musicians, etc.) in teaching centres, clinics, and theatres.

We will focus, at the end, on the topic of voice, analyzing it in a new way, also in the light of our personal hands-on experience.

“It’s the body that makes the voice” – Seminar
December 10th, 2024
7 pm – 10 pm (Hong Kong Arts Center, Eric Hotung Studio (B1 floor), 2 Harbour Road Wanchai)

Course description:
“Voice” means much more than the “physical product of the opening and closing movement, as well as the vibration of two or more vocal fords, or of their surrogate anatomical areas, by necessity or art”.

The voice is also produced by the parts of our skull that are called “resonators”, and articulators, as well as by many other factors and structures that we will briefly try to highlight and understand, considering the medicine of the voice and that of the arts.

“Postures of the scene: how the posture affects the performance” – Workshop
December 11th, 2024
7 pm – 10 pm (Hong Kong Arts Center, Eric Hotung Studio (B1 floor), 2 Harbour Road Wanchai)

Course description:
The director, the stage manager, the vocal coach can ask us to perform in situations that can be rather unusual or even risky from a medical point of view. Our general health and our voice health can be damaged if we do not know how to properly manage our stage postures.

The figure of the artistic athletologist, associated with that of the art doctor, should succeed to secure everything without distorting anything of the final artistic goal required, obviously with an interdisciplinary work that sees the artist as first effector.

“Nothing is as it seems: reading laryngoscopies (from the basics to the advanced analysis)” – Seminar/Workshop
December 12th, 2024
7 pm – 10 pm (Hong Kong Arts Center, Eric Hotung Studio (B1 floor), 2 Harbour Road Wanchai)

Course description:
Many speech therapists and voice doctors are not familiar with reading stroboscopy, no matter their ability to search for general and generic pathologies concerning the laryngology field. We rather refer to their familiarity to analyze videos and sound signals as evidence of what the performance can make manifest and trigger. Almost always, there is indeed at least one sign (and at least one symptom) that can be said to be pathognomonic when it comes to a correct or incorrect athletic gesture.

Our aim in these few hours is to study together several stroboscopic clips made by us to many international artists, and to provide you a better understanding of them, not just limited to otorhinolaryngological or speech therapy approaches, but also, and specifically, according to the medicine of the artistic voice.