Interactive performance and workshop with breath artist Shodekeh Talifero

Join voice artist Shodekeh Talifero for an interactive performance and workshop exploring the concepts and constructs of breath art and music. Shodekeh will explore the primary modalities of breathing, including the functional (basic breathing patterns), the expressive (laughter, crying), the kinesthetic (athletics), the artistic (acting), and the holistic (yoga). He’ll then examine how breath gets applied, embodied, emulated, and experiemented with to create music, dance, and art that responds to our environments. In a time when a pandemic affecting the respiratory system rages through the world and protests spring up responding to the call of Black and Brown people saying “I can’t breathe,” this workshop will be particularly relevant and moving for our current era.

With 34 years of personal, professional and community-based experience, Dominic “Shodekeh” Talifero continues to make musical strides as a groundbreaking and highly adept Beatboxer, Vocal Percussionist and Breath Artist who pushes the boundaries of the human voice within and outside the context of Hip Hop music and culture. As the first vocal percussionist to do so, he formally served as a dance technique musician and composer-in-residence for Towson University’s Department of Dance for 12 years and is the founding director of “Embody, A Festival Series of the Vocal Arts.” He has collaborated with musicians, dancers, and artists from around the world, including with Alash, a Tuvan throat-singing ensemble with whom he performed at Folklore Village this past spring. Shodekeh now serves as Towson University’s very first Innovator-in-Residence and lectures in a variety of departments at programs at Towson.