In early 2026 I completed a four-day intensive training in circlesinging and collaborative vocal improvisation with Guillermo Rozenthuler in London, supported by a NSW Government Next Steps professional development grant.

Rozenthuler’s pedagogy, which he calls Enabling Singing Villages, is built on the premise that humans have an innate capacity to make music together. The training provides methodology and tools to create conditions where people can access that capacity, experiencing themselves as authors of the music rather than participants in something predetermined.

This work represents a significant extension of my community arts cultural development practice. In structured group singing, people participate in material that already exists. In vocal improvisation, the group generates the music itself through spontaneous collective creation, with no score, no predetermined product, and no hierarchy of musical knowledge.

Anyone, regardless of musical background, can contribute an idea and hear it taken up and developed by others. The cultural product belongs entirely to the group that made it, and the skills and confidence developed remain in the community after the facilitation ends. The facilitating artist does not bring work to the community but creates conditions for the community to generate its own cultural expression.

This is CACD practice in its most distilled form: the art is not imported but grown, and its ownership stays where it was made. The methodology also connects to ancestral ways of music-making, traditions in which collective vocal creation was a primary form of cultural life rather than a specialised skill belonging to a trained few.