Singing with Archetypes

Subject: Singing with Archetypes
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 02:02 PM

I spotted a most intriguing book by Frankie Armstrong (the same I believe) entitled Acting and Singing with Archetypes (not yet released)

Synopsis:
"The journeys in "Acting and Singing with Archetypes" are based on the Voices of the Archetypes and Myths workshops that Frankie Armstrong has conducted throughout Europe, Australia and the United States. Primarily geared toward theater teachers, directors, and theater workshop leaders this groundbreaking, interactive book, with an accompanying CD, provides the means by which actors and singers can expand their creative choices by taking journeys to find the archetypes within themselves and then applying these discoveries to their work. Archetypes are universal essences that we all recognize: the Mother, the Lover, the Trickster, the Spiritual and Temporal Leader, the Devil. The first part of the book contains sixteen archetype journeys. Based on the beautifully crafted workshops of world-renowned singer and teacher Frankie Armstrong, each archetype journey is accompanied by preparatory explorations for the voice, body and imagination. The CD, sung by Ms. Armstrong, provides songs and examples of vocal ornamentation to prepare and assist the journeyer. The journeys provide opportunities for theater artists/singers to gain greater access to their whole being. Each archetype is not a fully developed character but rather its essence, images, forms, voices, bodies and a few psychological elements or shards, around which a performer can organize a portrayal and begin the journey toward full character development. The second part of the book contains suggestions on how to apply the discoveries to real acting situations, explaining how to use the archetypes in the creation of multifaceted characters and in classroom explorations such as mask making, improvisation, monologue, scene and song work and devising theater."

Seemingly the material contained in this volume, is based on workshops Frankie conducts.
Wondering if anyone has done any of Frankie's workshops on this stuff?

I find the notion of song work with archetypal characters, quite interesting.

It also strikes me, that within traditional folk song, there might also be found archetypal figures or voices - singular voices of collectively generated and recognised figures - echoes or representatives of which *arguably* may also be said to reside deep within each individuals mind. As such, I wonder to what extent we are giving a form of life to these archetypal figures, when we sing them?

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: GUEST,Ed
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 02:34 PM

Arty-farty bollocks...

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 02:35 PM

LOL! Was waiting to see how long that would take... ;-)

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: GUEST,Ed
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 02:40 PM

Well, what do you expect? :-)

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 02:58 PM

I saw that title and I said to myself that has to be a CS thread...

All Traditional Songs & Ballary deal in archetypes on a variety of levels which, even in the learning of, open up access to the inner-cultural vistas that inspired them. In relearning (for example) Butter and Cheese and All last year I was subject to visions and journeyings as though by way of re-initiation into the inner mysteries that underlie the archetypal narrative. The end is, of course, as you suggest, the channelling of such archetypes though the performance for both audience and performer. Through performance we realise a deeper level of personal / collective catharsis which is the function & purpose each song, which is a vehicle for ritual / ceremonial drama and profound magickal transformation and potency.

Narrative is determined by inner necessity finding collective experience by way of any given tradition, in this case that of the continuum of English Language Folk Song which is born from the collective subconscious dreaming as manifest through the idiosyncratic genius of the individual song-makers & singers - Shamans all!

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 03:02 PM

Arty-farty bollocks

Not at all - this is the pragmatic empiricism that underlies the potent beauty of Traditional Song & Balladry; this is the mechanism by which we become enchanted.

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: GUEST,Ed
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 03:20 PM

I totally disagree, but no point arguing, Suibhne O'Piobaireachd.

My brain is clearly wired in a very different way to yours...

I do like your music, mind.

Ed

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 03:23 PM

Cheers, Ed. Mind you - I can make a similar case for EastEnders.

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 04:02 PM

It's fun working out the archetypes in Eastenders.

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 05:28 PM

Aren't they all pretty much the same archetype?

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: sing4peace
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 05:40 PM

Dear Crow Sister -

Thank you for this thread.

Thinking Frankie must have been influenced by Carolyn Myss' writing in "Sacred Contracts" or Clarissa Pinkola Estes' "Women Who Run With the Wolves". Looking forward to more here...

your sister in hope and song,
Joyce

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 05:45 PM

You can 'make a similar case for bloody anything' — if you want to finish up in *Pseuds' Corner*

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: richd
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 06:04 PM

I have an intense dislike of Jungian proto facist bollocks. How can you fall for this tripe!!!
Even Levi-Strauss is more convincing than this- by far.

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 06:17 PM

"Through performance we realise a deeper level of personal / collective catharsis which is the function & purpose each song, which is a vehicle for ritual / ceremonial drama and profound magickal transformation and potency."

Something akin to Aristotle's "Catharsis of the emotions of pity and fear"? From what I've read, the authentic re-enactment of early Greek theatre, in its traditionally masked form - *can* even now, be an intensely transformative experience for the 'viewer as ritual participant'.

Sing4Peace I've heard of Myss, but I recall reading Pinkola-Estes some years back and being most affected. One of her wee books touched me the most though "The Gift of Story" where she describes her families emigration from Hungary (?). Hard to recall now, but I remember the offering of watering tears to a young garden of trees as something deeply human, correcting, and instinctively soulful at the same time.

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Paul Burke
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 06:19 PM

Ed: sorted.

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: richd
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 06:23 PM

Oh dear, I'm in the wrong universe....

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: sing4peace
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 06:32 PM

Sister Crow -

My favorite stories in the Wild Women collection are the ones about "Blue Beard" and the "Skeleton Woman". Very helpful to anyone dealing with depression or disappointment in love.

    "As such, I wonder to what extent we are giving a form of life to these archetypal figures, when we sing them?"

For those who have read Myss' or Estes' works, your thesis question here is a welcome one. For those who haven't the foggiest notion what we are talking about, maybe they'll learn something useful. I know I will.

Joyce

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 20 Sep 09 - 06:58 PM

"Oh dear, I'm in the wrong universe...."

I know Richd, I slip through that same portal every night...

Joyce, I don't know if I'm learning anything, but Brother SO'P's delightfully evocative prose, make's me feel like it MUST be doing me some kind of good at least.

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 04:51 AM

it MUST be doing me some kind of good at least.

When I heard CS singing her reconstruction of Ragwort Road it was immediately apparent that I hearing a transfiguration that was at once as intimately personal as it was revelatory of a more collective meme embodied in a lyric itself inspired by a line from the incantations of the witch Isobel Gowdie. That creative power is, I feel, mediumistic and requires a catalyst by way of providing focus - in that case the catalyst was a lyric for which the catalyst was an incantation collected from a witch during her trial. The result was both stunning in terms of its vibrational potency and aural beauty; the familiar made strange in what was, in essence, a ceremony of renewal as immediate as it was ancient. Through the media of a digital MP3 file I was reconnected with the primal Hedge-Witch; She who goes in the wild places, as CS does in her uniquely beautiful singing.

In the singing of Traditional Folk Song we are, in effect, conducting a seance with what lurks on the other side of The Revival, which is to say the primal core of our cultural dreaming in which these songs once ran wild and free in natural habitat of unspoiled woodlands, ancient field systems and anciently managed hedgerows which has now been stripped away and concreted over. I personally sing Traditional Folk Songs by way of a deeper ceremonial communion with this archetypal and very joyful wilderness in which I merrily wander as vagabond - which is why my music sounds the way it does - the music of a primal archetypal vagabondia. Even in performance Rachel and I use the songs as vehicles for an improvised immediacy of ritual purpose by which we might return something of the potency we find in field-recordings and singarounds where the individual sense dissolves into a deeper choral dreaming and one experiences the pure vibrant heart of the thing. The energy remains potent in its resplendent wyrdness, be it in songs of the Archetypal Hunt and Blood Sacrifice such as The Innocent Hare, or else in the weaving of the Bacchanalian Orgy that is McGintie's Meal and Ale.

A very timely thread methinks, CS - poised as we are on the very cusp of the Equinox, and the autumn...

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: theleveller
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 06:37 AM

After reading Jung's Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious I was amazed how many and how often archetypes appeared in my writing - not just the songs. Whether you accept Jung's theories or not, the archetypes - or representations of them - appear consistently in folklore, legend, myth and religion, right back to neolithic times.

To dismiss it as "arty-farty bollocks" simply displays arrogant ignorance.

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 07:32 AM

As both a creative writer and a teller of Traditional Folktales (and occasional singer of Traditional Folk Songs) I'd say that the very foundation of narrative morphology depends on the archetypal. On another thread we've been having fun discussion notions of Traditional Folk Song with respect of their evident collectivity being born, somewhat paradoxically, from the individuals who made, re-made, carried & sang them. Some can't see the wood for the trees; others can't see the trees for the wood, but both the trees and the wood have their roots buried in a far greater wonderment of the cultural subconscious which is carried collectively but manifest individually. We are each and every one of part of this; our every word and concept is defined by it, which I why I think of creativity as a mediumistic phenomenon which is about the manifestation of archetypes for the purposes of the Greater Cultural Catharsis we might overlook as simple Entertainment, which is anything but simple. All narrative is replete with such mythic elements - on Saturday Rapunzel and I went to see District 9, a masterpiece of robust storytelling shot through with humour, searching metaphor and a touching tenderness (rather than sentimental mawkishness) that left me in tears. Sci-Fi at its best I'd say, brimful of archetypes, and the interweaving of light and darkness in the classic Gnostic tradition. A ballad, indeed, of the highest order, with (quite possibly) elements of Tam Lin in there too...

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: GUEST
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 07:43 AM

"...creativity as a mediumistic phenomenon which is about the manifestation of archetypes for the purposes of the Greater Cultural Catharsis we might overlook as simple Entertainment, which is anything but simple. All narrative is replete with such mythic elements..."

Important to remember that not all creativity is narrative. There's a strong lyric tradition in folk music - particularly in American folk music. It's hard to make such a strong case for the archetype in songs or poems that don't have people in them, or which are collage-like collections of fragments.

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 07:48 AM

A few examples might be nice, GUEST.

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: GUEST,matt milton
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 07:48 AM

who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?!

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Jack Campin
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 08:12 AM

These sorts of classifications predate the First World bourgeoisie, but they've turned them into a folk art. Humours have been passe for a long time, but take your pick from star signs, pop-psych personality types, Chinese astrological year, dietary blood type, favourite crystal, shamanic totem animal. Jung was basically a Trinny and Susannah for the soul but he managed to persuade his customers that souls needed more help from the style consultant to fit them than bodies did.

I think it's mainly about distinguishing yourself from the sort of oik who seeks out the commonality of supporting the same football team. Though you might be allowed to support Partick Thistle or St Pauli.

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: GUEST,matt milton
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 08:25 AM

how about The Cuckoo (the US version that is: ie "...she never hollers coocoo till the 4th day of July"). or Shady Grove. or Buckeye Jim.

I'm thinking of those American old-time folksongs that are like cut-n-paste collages of remembered verses of other songs. With verses that don't really belong. Greil Marcus analyses them well in his 'Invisible Republic' book.

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: theleveller
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 08:28 AM

The idea of a workshop for people to consciously bring archetypes into their songs seems a bit of a contradiction. Archetypes are essential part of the subconscious and intrude into the creative process 'uninvited'and unnoticed until the process is complete. Hmm...think I need to go back and re-read Koestler's 'The Act of Creation'.

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: GUEST
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 09:00 AM

Suibnhe

I'm so glad you are on here holding this place. It's important. I'd never word it like you, but the essence is the same.

Sue

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: sing4peace
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 09:09 AM

ditto on that Sue.

JK

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: GUEST
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 09:12 AM

Whoops - sorry, Guest is me - Suegorgeous - away from my computer in Ireland. Forgot!

Sue

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 09:16 AM

I agree Jack. Typologies of any amount (call them humours, star signs or archetypes, same thing) as you say, are found throughout the history of human culture. Natures own fundamental tendency to organise and constellate random fragments into some kind of cohesive semblance of wholeness, is echoed by our own tendency to observe and attempt to catagorise that phenomena.

My philosophy teacher used to refer to one of his fave philosophers philosophies by saying "I'm Jumble Man!", meaning he was just a collage of bits and pieces generally hanging together. Yet it's THAT tendency for random stuff to morph and organise itself into patterns which we also somehow recognise and recreate, which is at the core of repeated motifs wherever generated and recognised. Be they as 'characters' in folk song, or indeed in Trinny and Suzanna's body typology. Something tells me however, that T & S's typology will be a little less long lasting than J's archetypes.

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Jack Campin
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 09:35 AM

My point was that they are NOT found throughout human culture. Some forms of categorization go back a long way (mainly oriented towards physical medicine), but the present-day bourgeois craze of seeking out exotic methodologies for self-classification is culturally specific, peculiar to upper-middle-class Western Europe in the late 19th century and to social groupings in a line of direct influence from that culture. It has nothing to say to humanity as a whole.

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: melodeonboy
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 09:42 AM

'ere, what's going on on this thread?!!!! My brain hurts!

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 09:43 AM

Sorry Jack, I misread you.
I thought Astrological typology (perhaps the most major of common form - which is also usually associated with medicine?) was pretty long standing in China and India at least, if not elsewhere. In fact I thought it went back to the Babylonians, though I might be wrong there.

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 09:47 AM

My point was that they are NOT found throughout human culture.

Oh no? Here's one for T & S anyway: Venus of Willendorf - C. 23,000 BC.

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 09:48 AM

Melodeonboy - we are experimenting with how much beer you need to drink, before you can legally talk utter bollocks on t'internet.
Rest easy however, despite the obvious dangers - it's all quite legal..

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: The Sandman
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 10:00 AM

The important thing about singing is to do it and enjoy it,its really quite simple.
here is one of my favourites,this version comes from Essex[its not all Billericay Dickie]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojVFPeU0YQU&feature=channel_page

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: theleveller
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 10:12 AM

"we are experimenting with how much beer you need to drink, before you can legally talk utter bollocks on t'internet."


Well I, for one, can do it stone cold sober. Anyway The Fool is an important archetype and The Fool's Journey the symbolic journey from ignorance to enlightenment.

(Told you I didn't need the beer!)

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Jack Campin
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 10:46 AM

Venus of Willendorf

Statue of a fst lady. The main universal she expresses is that's easier to carve a fat lady out of rock than a thin one because she won't break.

A few thousand years later the stone carvers of Ggantija in Malta came up with the idea of fat ladies with interchangeable heads. Wonder what I could charge for workshops on palaeolithic head-swapping?

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 10:59 AM

The important thing about singing is to do it and enjoy it,its really quite simple.

Well I certainly enjoyed your video, Dick - but couldn't help but wonder if the step-ladders were symbolic of a deeper transcendental yearning embodied in the traditional lyric...

the symbolic journey from ignorance to enlightenment.

I always though ignorance was enlightenment? Or is that innocence? Is there a difference? Well, as a wiser man that I once said:

Don't confuse ignorance with innocence; innocence is the vibrant preparedness for experience and empirical learning and as such it might never be lost, nor mislaid. Innocence empowers the prospective urge; innocence empowers our curiosity and can only ever be enriched by experience. Innocence is our constant companion throughout our life and, when at last we die, it is upon the gossamer wings of our angelic innocence that our souls will ascend heaven-ward.

Actually, it was me that said that, but when I was a significantly wiser (and drunker) man than I am today.

Statue of a fst lady. The main universal she expresses is that's easier to carve a fat lady out of rock than a thin one because she won't break.

Still turns me on, Jack.

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Mr Happy
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 11:01 AM

Arch types?

Smart Alecs?

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: alanabit
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 01:18 PM

I am quite sure that everything CS wrote about Frankie Armstrong's workshops is true and that people come away from them feeling uplifted and intellectually stimulated. I can't see them ever tempting me away from a good pint and a game of footie on the telly. Good luck to those who enjoy that sort of thing!

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Santa
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 02:25 PM

It has been argued that there are only ten basic plots in stories. (Please don't try to pin me down to the exact number (six, nine or whatever). In which case there can be only a limited number of roles that characters can play in these stories. So you will be able to translate these roles into "archetypes".

I've just been reading Terry Pratchet and Jacqueline Simpson on Folklore, wherein is said that a witch (and, by implication) a woman, falls into three categories: maid, mother and crone. (Baby/child being excluded.) I think whore has been overlooked there....

I recall a critique of R A Heinlein's fiction, in which it was convincingly argued that every one of his characters was based on three stages of growth: young, inexperienced and naive; mature and competent problem solver; all-knowing guru philosophiser.

The seven ages of man is as another, more familiar, example. These demonstrate that we can all be simplified and codified, by deletion of our individuality and selection of key duties/positions.

A folk song is necessarily limited in what it can provide in the way of character differentiation and/or growth. If novels have problems with generalisation of characters into simpler roles how much more problem is there in a song? The girl with the nut-brown hair. The dark-eyed girl. Bonnie Suzie. (OK, a traditional ballad has longer space, but the format does not permit character development: people have roles, around which the events occur.)

Now if you want to proceed to build mountains of discussion around the basic fact that characters in songs must play a limited number of roles, with little or no differentiation, then by all means do so, but I argue that it is no more than the limitations of the form.

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: BobKnight
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 02:35 PM

Did somebody mention Aristotle? I feel sleepy already.... the world's greatest cure for insomnia - I could never read more than 3-4 pages without falling asleep. Thank god my university days are long past. Wake me when we get to Cincinnati.... Marx.

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: sing4peace
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 03:24 PM

Have a nice nap -

No doubt you'd laugh at me telling you that I've been getting in touch with my inner Medusa - not to worry, I can handle it. Just don't come at me with a sword.

Older references have Medusa being the prime Goddess, mythologically speaking. She had three faces: maiden/mother/crone representing birth,life,death,rebirth,life,death,rebirth,life,death...

She got a bad rap for sure - starting out as the most revered goddess for her universal beauty. Her snakes represented wisdom, healing and prophecy. Comes the patriarchical re-write with a need to co-opt and destroy and makes Medusa into a monster. She was such a threat that she had to be beheaded. Some mythology says that as her head was carried away the snakes fell to the earth becoming the tribes of Africa.

The Medusa effect is when we become overwhelmed by too much information and freeze up - like a computer asked to complete a task it doesn't have the RAM for. The way to break the psychic (or spiritual) freeze up is through the mirror of contemplation.

Singing a song such as Peggy Seeger's "Song of Choice" I feel my head full of snakes alright. That's a scary song - makes some folks freeze up.

-------------

sssssssss all for now.
Joyce

Subject: RE: Singing with Archetypes
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 03:44 PM

Inner Medusa? No doubt very wise. I've alway's loved Euripides warning in the Bacchae for man to remember the old Gods, for (so the story goes anyway) if we fail to respect and honour them, they will rise up within us and wreak their vengeance upon us! Euripides is a wee bit more exciting than Aristotle...