'A Mouth In Search Of A Voice' creative workshops

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Members of the Phaedra Ensemble

Composer Jamie Hamilton invites you to explore your voice through music and storytelling, and become part of a new musical work involving people who stammer.

As part of his project A Mouth In Search Of A Voice, Jamie is putting on free creative workshops in Bristol, London, North Kent or online between 28^th February and 18^th April.

Through exercises drawn from theatre, music and storytelling, you'll be exploring the territory between spoken language and musical sound through the stammered voice. 

As a group, you'll collaboratively develop material and recordings with Jamie and musicians from Phaedra Ensemble. These will then be woven into a larger composition which will be performed live by the ensemble at events later this year.

The workshops last around four hours. You'll be working in a group alongside musicians, in a welcoming, stammering-friendly environment, with an experienced support team on hand.

Who can take part?

The free workshops are open to anyone who stammers, aged 16+. No experience is needed — just curiosity and a willingness to experiment with your voice.

Sign up

Fancy it? Sign up to one of the A Mouth In Search Of A Voice workshops on Eventbrite. 

If you have any questions about participating in the workshops, contact Jamie at stammerproject@gmail.com. Visit stammerworkshops.com for more details, and read below.

More information

Working with people who stammer across the UK, through A Mouth In Search Of A Voice, Jamie is creating a 'recorded tapestry' of stammered voices.  

Jamie says, "The project asks: how is language changed when traditional fluency isn't possible? People who stammer navigate speech differently — rapidly rewording, rerouting, reimagining. The project treats this not as dysfunction but as a creative act. By foregrounding the physical qualities of speech, the stammer becomes a liminal space where language starts to break down into sound.

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'At the workshops, we'll be developing voice elements for a larger composition which will include electronics and a video projection created in collaboration with artist, designer, and creator of Dysfluent Magazine, Conor Foran.

'Drawing threads between stammering and unreliable narration, the work traces a network of unlikely connections: Herman Melville's story Billy Budd, in which a trial scene hinges on a moment of fatal dysfluency; Daniel Defoe's The Storm, one of the earliest pieces of investigative journalism — here reimagined as a kind of forensic reconstruction, assembling contradictory eyewitness accounts of a biblical tempest that devastated Chatham; 16th century theories linking stammering to proximity to water; and new neuroscience mapping the different pathways stammered speech takes through the brain. Coastlines, tributaries, maps, flow; the language of water and navigation runs through the project, connecting bodies, voices and places".

The final work will be premiered by Jamie and Phaedra Ensemble in October, with live performances at two coastal venues with direct links to these source materials: the Historic Dockyard Chatham — where Royal Navy ships were built, and which was ravaged by Defoe's Great Storm — staged in one of the Dockyard's historic ship-building warehouses, and Arnolfini Bristol, home city of Billy Budd himself. 

A Mouth In Search Of A Voice is commissioned by Cement Fields and Phaedra Ensemble, supported by Arnolfini. It is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

See other events you can take part in.