Voicing loss

COMPASSIONATE HUMAN CONNECTIONS

Our Voicing Loss workshops support family members, loved ones, and individuals working in palliative care to collectively express feelings of grief and loss through music.

Rooted in research highlighting ensemble singing’s ability to facilitate deep connection, build empathy and forge strong communities*, Voicing Loss workshops help individuals build an accessible and creative toolkit for living with loss.

Voicing Loss is a Creative Health initiative and Compassionate Communities partnership between SANSARA and St Elizabeth Hospice in Ipswich. 

*(Fancourt et al. 2016, 2019; Levitin 2016)

Big give 2025

We’re delighted to have been chosen by the Big Give Arts for Impact match funding campaign to raise funds for this project. The campaign will run from 18-25 March 2025 and all donations are doubled.

Your support will go twice as far, helping us provide creative workshops for the hospice community at St Elizabeth’s.

Your donation will contribute to providing twelve sessions, one per month over the course of a year, at St Elizabeth Hospice, Ipswich. Whether it’s £5, £20, £50 or more, your donation matters.

Every gift you give will be matched, pound-for-pound, so now is the perfect time to get involved and make an even bigger impact. 

How to donate:

1. Click the button below

2. Choose your amount and make your donation which will then be doubled by match funding

3. Share the campaign with your friends and family

What does a Voicing Loss workshop look like?

Voicing Loss workshops feature a small group (4-6) of SANSARA’s professional singers and up to 12 participants. 

Led by our Wellbeing and Engagement Lead Fiona Fraser, the sessions include breath work and gentle vocal exercises, guided musical improvisations, and opportunities for quiet reflection during performances by our singers.

Participants are invited to use the time to check-in with their bodies via the breath and the voice, exploring how both are connected to their emotional state and regulation. 

By the end of the session, our aim is for participants to have gained a set of practical tools to help regulate their emotional and physical wellbeing. The workshop is also designed to facilitate connections between participants who have common experiences of loss.

Story

We’ve experienced first-hand the remarkable impact ensemble singing can have on those affected by loss.

In 2020, people were losing loved ones suddenly and often without opportunities to say goodbye. Funerals, memorials or other ceremonies were also severely limited due to the strict regulations at the time. As the pandemic wore on, the lack of space for shared expressions of loss soon contributed to a crises in complex and unresolved grief.*

We wanted to do something to respond to this crisis and between 2020-2021, we developed our Rite to Grieve pilot project in partnership with Ellie Harrison and The Grief Series with support from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. 

Alongside developing a new community workshop format, we commissioned Rebecca Dale to write a new piece for the project. My North was premiered at a commemorative ceremony at the National Covid Memorial Wall in March 2022.

Fast forward to 2024 and we were invited for a Creative Health residency at Britten Pears Arts where we developed our ideas with a range of practitioners working across music therapy and clinical psychology. You can find out more about the residency here.

The result was Voicing Loss, a new version of our workshop format with an increased focus on the breath as a tool for grounding oneself and helping to calm the onset of strong emotions. Gentle vocal exercises have also been incorporated throughout the workshop to encourage participants to explore using their voices to release tension while also creating a choral soundscape with others in the group, building peer-to-peer connection through sound.

The residency was followed by two pilot sessions at St Elizabeth Hospice and Snape Maltings in September 2024 and we excited to build on this line of work in the future.

*see this report from the National Centre for Social Research for a detailed analysis of the impact the pandemic had on grief and bereavement in the UK.