Day 4 Mouthful in Brazil

Our Brazil adventure is a gift that keeps on giving, and today has been as profound and inspiring a day as yesterday! We traveled across São Paulo to Osasco, where we spent the morning with some of the children and young people who attend Guri's music programmes, along with their parents and teachers. It was a really special morning, and a beautiful privilege to be welcomed into the musical heart of this friendly community of music. One of the songs we taught them was Katherine's 'Home 3', long a staple of our live set, which speaks of the refuge we can find in each other's care. In a beautiful moment of serendipity, outside there was a mural of Guerreiro Zumbi, the escaped slave who built a community for escaped slaves, so it seemed like an obvious choice to record the song we'd just made in front of it! The video is here, and has some amazingly joyous moments in it!

We worked with Guri's youth choir again in the afternoon, and they really are amazing - they devour everything we bring to them, and always give absolute commitment, and make a fantastic sound! We worked with them to animate some of the pieces for Saturday, and their creativity, commitment and community spirit are outstanding!

This evening, we had the pleasure to work with some of Guri's tutors and teachers, and they made some truly remarkable musical moments. Katherine led them through some creative exercises which brought out a very wide range of unusual - and at times hilarious! - ways of using the human voice, while Dave taught them Bethany Elen Coyle's Geordie Song Sandwich (with added bassline), and set out an invitation to them to bring their own snippets of 'home's songs to mash up in Thursday evening's workshop.

A real highlight of the trip so far was the exquisitely moving version of Helen Chadwick's arrangement of Shakespeare's 'If We Shadows Have Offended...' which Katherine and Bex led at the close of the evening workshop. Taking over the foyer at EMESP, the singers span beautiful sounds around the space, circling and enveloping each other in rich harmonies which people found profoundly moving. A video will surely follow...

We talk about 'The Mouthful Way' as a journey, not a destination, because we're always learning more about ourselves and what it means to sing our way through the world together. We make the road by walking, and days like today really highlight what a privilege and a joy it is to do what we do.