Author’s reflection
As I continue developing I am Maria! as both a performance and a site of research, these questions about voice, identity, and transformation become increasingly vital. What happens when the classically trained voice unlearns its boundaries and rediscovers its natural expression?
Our voice, the singing voice, the speaking voice is instantly recognisable. It is unique.
I’ve always been fascinated by it, by its mystery and power. The voice can trigger memory, awaken emotion, reveal truth. It can betray who is lying and who is sincere. The singing voice, in particular, bypasses all the layer, it is the most human and direct way of communicating, of telling a story, of feeling and being felt.
Over the years, I’ve studied my voice and traveled the world in pursuit of the dream to sing. Along the way, there were disappointments and detours. I missed cues, trusted the wrong mentors, and held on too long out of loyalty and the desire to please. I believed that if I were the “good student,” things would eventually fall into place. But the truth is, that unquestioning need to please was the very thing that held me back.
When I finally found a mentor who truly understood me who helped me reclaim my voice, it was too late for an opera career. But slowly, I began to realise that I could do more. I didn’t have to fit into the conventional mould. I could communicate through theatre, music, and voice in my own way, through my own truth.
I started writing, inventing, reconnecting with the part of myself I had lost the creative being, the storyteller.
In doing so, I discovered that to move forward, I would first have to face my past disappointments and vocal barriers to heal them rather than hide them. Little did I know that this journey would lead me to a Master of Philosophy in the very place once associated with my deepest vocal trauma.
Now, the Conservatorium has become a place of healing, reflection, and transformation. Through my studies, and through I am Maria! I continue to explore how the voice wounded and reborn can become a vessel of truth and change.
These insights, these reflections, I share here as markers of the path I’ve walked and as a gesture of hope for others who have experienced their own disappointments, silences, and transformations.
Because the world needs art. It needs song. It needs stories and it needs love.
In the act of singing, of making music, we offer nourishment of another kind; food for the human heart.
