HONG KONG ONLINE ENGLISH
Performing Arts Medicine Week 2024, December 7th – 12th (DISCOUNTED COMBO)

PAM
PERFORMING ARTS MEDICINE
HONG KONG WEEK
December 2024

(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.

VENUE:  7th and 8th of Decemeber: to be confirmed (surely Hong Kong Island). all the other days: Hong Kong Arts Center, Eric Hotung Studio (B1 floor), 2 Harbour Road Wanchai.

HOW TO REGISTER: Registration is finalized in 2 steps:

STEP 1: Contact details and attendance preferences at this link

STEP 2: Registration is finally confirmed upon payment of a fee of HK$7,000 (HK$6,000 if paid by 17th of November 2024). The procedure can be carried out at the bottom of this page.

CERTIFICATE: A certificate will be issued by CeimArs and FMVOICESTUDIO Limited. Online attendance for “Vocal First Aid” grants a certificate as “auditor”.

DO YOU WANT TO ATTEND ONLY ONE EVENT?

Then check the registration page for the even that you want to attend:

• “Vocal First Aid”
•  “PAM – Performing Arts Medicine: What is it? How can it help performers, teachers and therapists?”
• “It’s the body that makes the voice”
• “Postures of the scene: how the posture affects the performance”
• “Nothing is as it seems: reading laryngoscopies (from the basics to the advanced analysis)”

INSTRUCTORS: DR. PROF. ALFONSO GIANLUCA GUCCIARDO and FRANCESCO MECORIO

Dr. Prof. ALFONSO GIANLUCA GUCCIARDO
hc BA, MHum, MD, double PhD

Alfonso Gianluca Gucciardo is a doctor, teacher and researcher, a “pioneer” (as Juan Bosco Calvo Minguez wrote) of a “new and original” approach to the Medicine of performing arts and artists, the foundations of which, in fact, he is establishing in Italy in a radically different way compared to the English, Northern European and American interpretative styles. In Lebanon, he teaches at the University of Kaslik (USEK); in Italy, at the “Niccolò Cusano” University. For the latter, he is the creator and scientific and didactic director of both the Level I University Master’s Degree in “Medicine of performing arts” and the University Specialization Course in “Athletology for artists”. An independent scholar and researcher, from 2000 to today, thanks also to his specializations in Otorhinolaryngology and Bioethics and Sexology and his diplomas in Performance Arts, he has produced several works on the themes of theater, phoniatrics and phonopedia, sectors in which he has specialized. With five different independent and non-paying Italian publishing houses, he has so far published nine essays in print related to his main areas of clinical investigation (started, back in 2004, at the Phoniatrics and Phonosurgery Service of the “Bufalini” Hospital in Cesena under the supervision of Andrea Ricci Maccarini and Delfo Casolino) but also doctoral and academic (carried out at the Universities of Montpellier in France and Messina in Italy, under the direction of Philippe Goudard and Fabio Rossi) which are the following: “Performing Arts Medicine”, “voice medicine”, “sociology and philosophy of the vocal” and “human sciences”. Although he is known for being an attentive concierge doctor and a counselor of many international VIPs, he loves, in truth, to take care of every artist, at whatever level they perform; precisely for this reason, he strongly wanted the “Permanent Observatory for the Medicine of the Arts” of PAS  for which he is responsible in Palermo. As a “unique, unusual and even profitably futuristic and visionary man and artist” (at least according to the historic definition of Krzysztof Izdebski), he co-founded and directs the “Centro italiano interdisciplinare di Medicina dell’Arte” (CEIMArs), an independent, non-profit and borderless workshop designed, unique in its kind, to take care not (only) of artists but of the arts themselves (first and foremost, of performance arts). Almost always in overalls or work clothes, since 2004, he has been tirelessly bringing, upon invitation, his theoretical and practical experience to Universities and Academies, Theaters and Clinics, especially in America, Asia and Europe, where he loves to meet both clinicians and especially performers with whom he ends up getting his hands, feet and willingly his entire body dirty with stage dust every time.

FRANCESCO MECORIO
EMCI, Professor, Vocal First Aider, PGCert Voice Pedagogy

Francesco Mecorio is an active vocal coach and singing teacher with an international career. He’s been teaching singing and providing spoken voice lessons for more than 20 years.
He trained in pop / rock, jazz, soul, gospel, opera. He’s attended many musical courses, lectures, workshops, lectures, and seminars for singing, spoken voice, vocal pedagogy, and medicine and how they’re applied to voice in performing arts in both Italy and abroad (United Kingdom, United States, Australia).
He obtained the EMT certification (Estill Master Trainer, formerly CMT) under the mentorship of Elisa Turlà in 2012, and achieved his EMCI certification (Estill Mentor and Course Instructor, formerly CCI). This has been under the mentorship of Anne-Marie Speed, with whom she perfected in London since 2011. Credit is due to the precious support of the Australian Naomi Eyers.
He attended the Estill World Voice Symposia in Rome (2011), Boston (Harvard University, 2013) and Melbourne (2015).
Thanks to Estill training, his university studies in phonetics, and personal research work, he has over the years, specialized in the technical control of the voice, phonetics, and diction. He also performed as a pop and jazz singer until 2013. He then decided to devote himself entirely to teaching. He had previously worked as an actor, director, and assistant director for several important Italian shows (including “La Carezza di Dio”, written & directed by Francesca Zanni and Paolo De vita).
In Italy he‘s been teaching privately in various schools, academies of music, and in the performing arts since 2000. He was the vocal coach, among others, of Silvia Caracristi (“The Voice of Italy”, winner of “Sanremolab 2007”), Deborah Calì (“Moldova are Talent”), soloists, and RAI TV singers Valentina Ducros (“Dancing with the Stars”) and Stefania Caracciolo (“Dancing with the Stars”, “Telethon” – also performer in “Rent” and numerous other shows).
He has lived in Korea from 2013 to 2019, working as a researcher and assistant professor at Hongik University in the Musical Theater department in Seoul. Hongik University is one of the most renowned Asian universities in the field of art. He held the professorships of vocal Training 1, Musical Vocal Training 1, 2, and 3, and courses of Musical Repertoire and Performance (Performing Arts Lab) for the Master Degree in Performing Arts.
He was the first Estill Voice Training teacher to reside in Asia – contributing massively to its diffusion throughout the continent, but especially within South Korea.
In Seoul, 2017, he was vocal coach of the American cast of “Dreamgirls”, having the honor of working with Broadway performers including Bre Jackson (Effie in Dreamgirls and also Cynthia Erivo’s understudy in “The Color Purple”, Tony winner Awards and Daytime Emmy Award production), Tyler Hardwick (CC in “Dreamgirls”, in the Tony Award winning production of “Once on This Island”), Nik Alexander (Jimmy in “Dreamgirls”, “Motown” but also working on his own soloist project), and Candice Marie Woods (Deena in “Dreamgirls”, “Hairspray”, and “The Book of Mormon”)
He has been the vocal coach or teacher of several Korean celebrities in musical theatre and the K-pop scene, including: Park HyeNa (Korean voice of “Let it go” in Disney movie “Frozen”, Elphaba in “Wicked”), Sin YeongSuk Lisa (Bonnie in “Bonnie and Cllyde, Mrs. Denvers in “Rebecca “, Lucy in “Jekyll and Hyde”,”Rocky Horror Show”), Choi HyunJu (Christine in” Phantom of the Opera”,”Rudolf”), O SoYeon (star of “42nd Street”, Mrs DeWinter in “Rebecca”), Jang HeeYoung (original member of the famous k-pop group “Gavy NJ”), Lee SangJun (the wizard in “Wicked”, “Kinky Boots”, “The Man who Laughs” with Park Hyo Shin), Nam KyungJu (also a wizard in” Wicked”), Ju-A (Bonnie and Clyde, All Shook Up, Menopause), and many others.
He held practice groups for Anne-Marie Speed, Kiereen Lock, and Paul Farrington’s EVT courses in London in 2014 at Royal Academy of Music, in 2015 at Urdang Academy 2, and in 2016 at Baden Powell House. He also did so for Anne-Marie Speed in Seoul, 2017, at Hongik University, and in Manchester, 2019, at The Arden school of theater, and for Naomi Eyers in 2018 in Hong Kong (Artfitti). With Naomi Eyers as supervisor he also presented as EMCI-C (Estill Mentor and Course Instructor Candidate) part of levels 1 and 2 EVT courses in Seoul, 2019, at Seoul Jazz Academy, the Korean headquarters for the Berklee Academy of Music of Boston., and as Anne-Marie Speed as supervisor in 2019 in Manchester, at The Arden School of Theatre. He’s currently Naomi Eyers’ assistant in 2 courses for voice and singing teachers who are willing to earn the EMT certification. He has held seminars and conferences in Italy, France, South Korea (Konkuk University), Tokyo (Lirica Studio, KM Art Hall, Studio 1619, Waseda Hoshien), and Osaka (Yoshu Hall).
Since 2016, he has been appointed for three consecutive years for the position of being a member of the International Board of KAVPA. This is the Korean Association for Voice of Performing Arts.  He’s an author and is currently working on several publications. He’s published his first book in collaboration with the internationally renowned ENT and Doctor of Artistic Voice and Performing Arts Medicine, Alfonso Gianluca Gucciardo.

If you have specific questions or want to know more, you can CONTACT me whenever you want.

Course organized by FMVOICESTUDIO
and CEIMArs