The 2009 IAVMT Conference took place in a beautiful and peaceful monastery in Austria, near Graz, and was organized by Eva Campbell-Haidl, the President of the IAVMT. The event lasted seven days and was comprised of three days of Supervision, a Directors Meeting day and the Conference. The Conference included an open day with workshops and performances from practitioners for 25 invited guests, and the Annual General Meeting.

Anne Brownell, USA	Eva Campbell-Haidl, Austria
Simon Dryer, UK	Lilith Gottfarb, UK/Sweden
Melanie Harrold, UK	Christine Isherwood, USA
Joan Harris, UK	Sophie Martin, Australia
Lena Mandotter, Sweden	Veronica Phillips, UK
Sebastiana Mikulova, UK/Czech Republic	Petra Rudolf, Austria
Hennie Pienaar, South Africa	Tracy Starreveld, UK
Mali Sastri, USA	Helen White, Canada
Daryl Vineberg, Canada	Yaron Ziv, Israel

PROGRAM

The purpose of the conference was multi-faceted: to nurture the international VMT community, our practices and understanding of the use of Voice Movement Therapy in various contexts and professional settings, to share the wealth of strengths and talents amongst the practitioners, and to celebrate VMT as a powerful tool that can transform people's lives.

We also utilized this conference to make a powerful leap forward in presenting VMT to the public and showing ourselves as a professional association that represents a discipline which can stand firmly on its own two feet.


SUPERVISION

During this year's supervision, practitioners witnessed and worked with a dream enactment in sound and movement, led by Christine Isherwood. We reviewed the VMT core principles, as well as the practice of massage, compression and manipulation in VMT, facilitated by Anne Brownell. The group discussed and brainstormed ways in which VMT can be effectively and sensitively used in work with women and children who have experienced sexual abuse in Kenya. We focused on this subject to support Sophie Martin who is going to Kenya to offer her services later this year. Veronica Philips shared her experience of working with people with Multiple Sclerosis. The group reflected on the nature of illness in general and ways to engage with it creatively. Lilith and Sebastiana invited practitioners to share their experiences of group facilitation and group journeys. Yaron Ziv reported on his challenges in facilitating a VMT group for Orthodox Jewish women, and helping them to expand their expression while at the same time, fitting into their belief system. The group supported him in generating some creative ideas.

One afternoon of supervision was dedicated to updating practitioners on the recent developments in the process of trying to make the VMT training an accredited and recognized academic course. Dr Yaron Ziv has been very active in making this a reality, and has established links with two universities in the States, where the VMT training is currently being reviewed for accreditation purposes. The whole discussion will be summarized by Melanie Harrold and can be sent to those who are interested on request.

At the end of this discussion Lilith Gottfarb and Tracy Starreveld, who had completed their qualifying requirements, were officially welcomed into the circle of professional members.


CONFERENCE

The last practitioners arrived on Thursday evening and everyone joined in group singing, sharing songs from around the world and harmonizing and improvising together. On Friday, the first day of the conference, various practitioners offered a range of workshops and presentations.


Practitioners' Day: Friday 2nd October



Voicing the four directions - Veronica Phillips.
The Four Directions honored in Shamanism are a powerful and potent guide. They help us to feel our connection with the Earth. In this workshop we honored the Four Directions in sound and song from the top of a mountain on a misty cool morning. We became aware of our Ancestors and experienced the different qualities of each direction by embodying their unique metaphors and symbols, and expressed both collectively and individually their meaning as connected to our own lives.







Voice & Muscular Tension – Tracy Starreveld.
In this fascinating and highly-informative workshop, Tracy shared the story of her own vocal development from childhood to the present day, offering herself as a client case study with demonstrations of voice production, body postures and breathing. She invited participants to listen and observe, then comment on any perceived patterns of muscular tension. Tracy made reference throughout to insights gained and progress made through her experiences of Voice Movement Therapy. She also recounted her recent work with a Speech and Language Therapist, after being diagnosed with Muscle Tension Dysphonia, and finally led the group through a series of related exercises.







Gestalt and VMT - The mutual dance – Dr. Yaron Ziv.
In this partly experiential and partly theoretical workshop, practitioners had an opportunity to learn about the impact of Gestalt principles on VMT and vice versa. In the second half of the workshop, Yaron gave a presentation outlining the principles that VMT and Gestalt have in common, and reflected on their compatibility, whilst focusing on the creative potential of these two disciplines put together.









Letters to a young singer by Lena Måndotter.
It was a real treat to view Lena's newly released short film about song and therapy from a Jungian perspective, all filmed in the mountains of Crete in Greece. The film is now available on DVD from her website. Marion Woodman has been very supportive of Lena's film: "The film LETTERS TO A YOUNG SINGER clearly shows Lena Måndotter's deep understanding of the connection between song, psyche and body-soul work. Lena is a singer, song-therapist, writer and film-maker and the depth of the movie is shown in the original and convincing way she uses the images! People who watch this film will be moved at a deep level and even if they don't understand everything with their heads; their bodies will definitely understand."



"Open House", Saturday, 3rd. October


Opening-Welcoming all of us and our guests - 25 people from all over Austria: teachers, singers, musicians, vocal pedagogues, psychotherapists, theatre people and others – Eva Campbell-Haidl



"The beauty of the dared expression" (from Alfred Wolfsohn): A brief history and purpose of VMT - a talk by Anne Brownell, given in German by Anne and Eva.

This comprehensive and informative talk, which was much appreciated by the guests, was followed by three parallel workshops. Practitioners and guests were able to choose one workshop in the morning and another in the afternoon.

Three parallel workshops, morning and afternoon, with a translator for each workshop (Petra Rudolf, Terri Gattringer and Elisabeth Thallinger).


In Celebration of the Uniqueness of the Self - Christine Isherwood

This experiential workshop began with an introduction to the movement and vocal work, which constitutes Voice Movement Therapy. The participants went on to explore a vocal and movement landscape, visiting areas of the voice known to us and new to us. Christine raised questions about how the self is invoked in song and sound? How to reach into the depths of the self and not only come into contact with what resides there but also to bring it out, to express it and let it go, or let it be made visible and audible so that we have had a tangible experience of it, of ourselves, or of something transpersonal. In this workshop we reclaimed some of our unvoiced and unheard selves. We were invited to hear ourselves in different ways by communicating through song, the songs we breathe into the world through being and moving.




The Embodied Voice: An Introduction to Voice Movement Therapy - Anne Brownell

"It is the limitations of our being which makes us sad and angry and constitutes our fear… If one wants to change character, it is not enough to talk about feelings: they must be experienced and expressed." (Alexander Lowen) Whether one is working with one’s own voice, with singers or other performers, clients in therapy, or individuals experiencing developmental or injury-related impediments, change of some kind is usually what is being sought. In this workshop, we began to explore some of the ways VMT engages us in this quest through the medium of the sounding voice.



Singing All Angles: VMT and the Planes of Expression - Melanie Harrold

Singing is a multilayered dynamic process. The challenge when singing our song is in staying present to the resonance of our soul’s intent within our voices while reaching for and receiving contact. The theme of this workshop was to explore the relationship between the therapeutic understanding within VMT and the existential sung moment of relational and artistic expression.









In the afternoon Eva Campbell-Haidl, Melanie Harrold and Sophie Martin with Petra Rudolf and Daryl Vineberg performed songs for the invited guests. At the end, Eva led everybody in singing "Over my head", a groovy Gospel, as well as an Austrian yodel song, 'Dui Dui', bringing the Austrian guest community and our global VMT community together in song, as well as both the Open House day and the 2009 VMT conference to a close.




AGM and final discussions - Sunday 4th October

With many thanks to Sebastiana Mikulova and Anne Brownell for their work on the report, to the IAVMT Directors for their editing, and to Hennie Pienaar for his photos of the conference.