FACILITATOR
SINGING LESSONS
Anna has twenty five years’ experience as a singer working in opera, musicals and cabaret. She has taught singing at Pineapple Performing Arts School (London), Folkestone Academy, Dover Grammar School for Boys (where she also runs a music tech club) and from her private studio. She has also run choirs at all these institutions.
Singing lesson enquiries click HERE
MUSIC & Composition WORKSHOPS
Anna often runs music and performance workshops as part of larger performance projects. She has also run workshops for: Creative Folkestone, Touchbase Care, Sound and Music, Canterbury Christ Church University, Elevate festival and Take Up Space.
Most recently she took the role of local Musical Director for the RSC production of Julius Caesar on their tour to the Marlowe Theatre (Canterbury). She ran workshops and rehearsals for the community chorus.
The Marlowe has decided to extend this work and she now runs a community chorus for the theatre.
For International Womens' Day 2017, Anna facilitated a ‘DIY Punk Band’ workshop as part of the ‘Older Women Rock’ festival with fellow musician Gemma Storr. To listen to the results click HERE.
"You and Gemma helped me realise a lifelong ambition, i.e. to play the drums. I had the most wonderful time. You will never know how good the experience made me feel. I was like a child when I got home, too excited to sleep! I want to do it all again, tonight!" Workshop participant
On Saturday 27th January 2018 Anna and fellow MCC member Phil Self, invited the families of Folkestone to try something new and compose music, with the Montrose Composers’ Club at local arts hub ‘Block 67’.
Participants created their own sounds in Phil's ‘mini studio’ using a granular processing app, samples and live instruments. Elsewhere Anna helped people create and record their own tape cassette loops, whilst regular MCC collaborators Helen Lindon and Stewart Hughes encouraged children, OAPs and everyone in-between to create a large scale graphic score. At intervals the whole group would get together to form an improvised orchestra which Anna conducted as they played the graphic score 'live'.
Anna, members of the Montrose Composers’ Club and artist Helen Lindon ran a four hour drop-in workshop for families exploring graphic scores and improvisation on January 26th 2019. The participants were encouraged to draw what they could hear and then create their own graphic scores to be played by members of the MCC or a small orchestra of participants on simple instruments.
FREE RANGE ORCHESTRA
Anna co-runs the Free Range Orchestra with lecturer and musician Dr. Sean Williams. The twenty-strong improvisors orchestra performs regularly at Free Range (Canterbury) and has performed and recorded with improvisation ledgends Evan Parker and Maggie Nicols.
FREE WOMEN
Anna co-runs Free Women with musician and researcher Maureen Wolloshin. They group consists of improvising performers based in East Kent who create work which incorporates spoken word, movement, music, puppetry and costume. Their current project is called ‘Lady Garden’ and in the words of Free Woman Kat Peddie it:
“interrogates certain capitalist and patriarchal forms of rest, seeing them as spaces of domestic work for women: positing the garden both as a space of pressure to perform restful space and as a space with real potential for radical restfulness”.
See it for yourself at Free Range Canterbury on Thurs. Nov. 16th 2023.