MUSIC WORKSHOP FOR WOMEN

Abstract

The voice is the central resource of this project that brings together women from the Évora’s Cerebral Palsy Association (APCE), four mothers of young people with disabilities and two young people over 18 years old who are clients of the association. Oficina de Música para Mulheres (Music Workshop for Women) is a project developed within the Orquestra Sem Fronteiras' participatory art program, Terra a Terra,by a violinist/music teacher, in coordination with the Music Therapist at the APCE, working with 6 participants of the Center for Rehabilitation and Social Integration. Understanding that music and the exploration of vocal projection have a transforming power in people's lives, the project aimed to bring active listening, discussion and analysis of feminist empowerment theme songs and the basic teaching of music for the specific purpose of singing. Eight weekly sessions were held between May and July 2021. With the general objective of finding us through music, we are currently witnessing a type of discourse that places us in a double discrimination: that of being a woman and that of being a woman with a disability. We deepen the place of women from the poetry of song lyrics, their history and representation in the daily lives of the participants, deconstructing the status quo of how we should be and how we were taught or how society sees us. At the end, there was a public presentation of the final product, a group performance in keeping with the theme and proposal of the Workshop. We aspire to result in a change in this specific collective with regard to emotional expression, self-image and self-confidence.  Finally, we applied the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) scale (Galinha & Pais-Ribeiro, 2005) to observe changes in affects in order to support the methodology and replicate the format used in other spaces.