This workshop is an intensive exploration of the voice as a physical, expressive, and imaginative instrument. Through guided exercises in breath, body awareness, vocal technique, and improvisation, participants will expand their range of sound, access new textures, and develop a more integrated connection between voice and body.
We will work across modes of vocalization including speech, extended techniques, resonance, distortion, and dynamic control—approaching the voice not as a fixed identity but as a flexible, responsive system. The workshop emphasizes presence, listening, and risk, creating a space where participants can experiment beyond habitual patterns and discover new capacities.
In the context of our current moment, where communication is often compressed, polarized, or disembodied, this work invites a return to voice as a site of agency, complexity, and transformation. Participants will leave with concrete tools for vocal expansion, as well as a deeper understanding of how voice operates under pressure, emotion, and performance.
Open to performers, musicians, actors, and anyone interested in developing a more powerful and nuanced vocal expression. No prior experience with extended techniques is required.
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Sunday
June 7th
12pm-4pm
in the Skunk Room
About the Instructor:
Carmina Escobar (Mexico City, 1981) is a Los Angeles–based radical vocalist and intermedia artist working across voice, performance, sound art, experimental theater, and film. Her work engages the voice as a site of rupture, ritual, and transformation, moving through questions of migration, embodiment, and communication. She has presented work internationally at venues including The Broad, REDCAT, The Kitchen, CTM Festival, and Fábrica de Arte Cubano, and is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award (2026) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Artist Award in Music/Sound (2020).
Alongside her artistic practice, Escobar has developed a rigorous and expansive pedagogical practice over more than two decades, including as faculty in the VoiceArts program at CalArts. She has led workshops and masterclasses internationally across the United States, Mexico, Cuba, Norway, the Czech Republic, and Portugal, working with artists across disciplines.
Through her studio HOWL SPACE, she cultivates a student-centered, embodied approach to the voice, integrating body and breath awareness, extended vocal techniques, and vocal improvisation as tools for both performance and creation. Her teaching opens a space for experimentation, risk, and discovery, where participants develop their own vocal language and generate original work. Rooted in the understanding of voice as both instrument and process, she supports artists in expanding their expressive range, building vocal and physical endurance, and sustaining practices that emerge from the body rather than imposed form. Her teaching philosophy prioritizes process before system, behavior before form, and intuition before reason.
Class cancellation policy: No refunds, exchanges, or transfers.