Wounded healer

In the year 2000 I finished my work as a lecturer of the International School for Human Voice, lead by Ida Kelarová. Ida then proposed that I write a book on her work and life. I rejected. I did not want to be hung up by something which I had already considered to be the past for me. Today I feel sorry – as if I had failed to fulfill a duty. A duty not toward Ida or myself – some things simply should be done. Although we do not have to know why or for whom. So – may this article be a late and very modest pay off of a debtor. At the same time it represents a viewpoint of someone, who was lucky enough to get to know Ida Kelarová on both the working and personal level and today can look at things from greater distance.

A singer, arranger, teacher, choir master, organizer, one of the leading personalities in music, a Roma activist – this could be the enumeration of her activities. This list would make quite a incongruous picture, if we were not aware, what connects all these activities together.

Ida Kelarová is a phenomenon. With her we can not and must not separate the professional from the personal. Her method of work with the voice is sometimes regarded dangerous and incomprehensible. Not only laymen keep asking, what is this woman after, when she asks the participants of her workshops to confess in front of the others their traumatising experiences with the mother, provokes them not to be afraid and express their maximal anger. And not only that. She covers their eyes for two days with a scarf, forbids them to speak and when these adult, mature people cry just like small children, she considers this to be a success. And what does all this have to do with singing?

A crash-course of Ida’s philosophy

Even today we do not really know who we are. We are simply afraid, stuck in our fears and worries. We are afraid of the fact, that we are afraid. We are afraid of such feelings as sadness and pain. We are afraid of anger. We are afraid to be satisfied and we are afraid of love, afraid to love and be loved. We have come so far that we have become victims to our system. Being a victim means feeling sorry for ourselves as well as feeling weak.
I.K.

Ida’s work is based on a fundamental belief, that everybody can sing. A person who is not able to intone, is a person, who in his childhood trusted those who told him he has no musical ear. This, put in a simplified way, is the reason why it is necessary to search deeper for the causes of a closed voice. Voice is just an indicator of what takes place inside the person at given moment.

She works the way she lives and vice versa. She herself does not hide the traumatising relationship with her mother, but she shares this experience in her work. She proudly avows her Roma roots on her father’s side.

She treats her co-workers and participants of her workshops naturally as part of a large Roma family, for which she likes to care and does so with love. Of course that this kind of a family is based on principles, which can seem “incomprehensible” to “gadžo” (white) people. However, they are part of ancient knowledge of our ancestors, part of which Ida herself feels to be.

She does not set boundaries between professional and personal values. Neither does she sort basic human emotions (joy, sadness, fear, love, pain, anger) into good ones and bad ones. The important thing is how does one approach these emotions (what attitude does he/she adopt toward himself, toward what takes place inside him/her). Whether he/she only pushes his/her pain deeper inside (“because it is not proper to feel pain”), or whether he/she is able to go through it and transform it into a creative act.

She points out how the man of today is disconnected from his feelings, how nowadays we are not able to suffer and experience pain.

In the emotions she finds the expression of human strength, not of weakness. Therefore for her, the word “emotion” often means a synonym for the word “strength”.

Despite the fact that the way she works with voice sometimes borders on therapy, dramatic art and someone may even consider it a spiritual exercise, it is not based on any theses from books or teachings of any master. Because Ida gained no knowledge from books, she resists everything academic and in an almost Buddhist fashion refuses to receive knowledge in any other way than through one’s own and direct experiencing, especially on the emotional level. The only resource of what she does is her own reflection of her life.