Lexi Pulido offers immersive and playful vocal workshops designed specifically for dancers, bridging breath, sound, musicality, and physical storytelling. Her sessions guide movers into a deeper relationship with their own voice as an expressive, rhythmic, and resonant part of the body.

These workshops support dancers in discovering vocal freedom, strengthening musical intuition, and integrating sound into movement-based performance.

 

What the Workshop Covers

1. Arrival + Introduction

Participants begin by introducing themselves—including a memorable trick for remembering each person’s name—establishing an atmosphere of connection, curiosity, and collaboration.

 

2. Vocal Warm-Ups 

Lexi guides dancers through voice-as-body warmups that build awareness, breath support, and resonance:

• Breath mapping: belly–ribs–chest awareness to connect with oxygen and embodied expansion

• Vocal energizers: V’s, rolled R’s, and lip trills

• Panting into laughter: discovering the natural rebound of breath

• Resonance slides: HUM → “nyum” → “mum” → sighs → gentle glottal fry

• Articulation play: stretching the face, tongue flexibility, repeat-after-me phrases

These warmups help dancers feel the voice as an extension of physical motion.

 

3. Group Sound Play

Lexi introduces “parameters of sound” in a collaborative group setting:

• Occlusions for airflow: inhaling/exhaling through lips, tongue, or snore-like shapes

• Breathless sounds: lip pops, tongue clicks, smacks

• Tone shifting: bright → dark (posterior to nasal resonances)

• Dynamics exploration: loud vs. soft, stability vs. release

• Coordination drills: using lips and tongue for crisp attacks (“too/wah”), airy sighs, “foo” shapes

This portion builds vocal versatility and shared sonic awareness.

 

4. Partner and Small-Group Improvisation

Dancers work in pairs or trios to improvise using both phonatory (pitched) and non-phonatory (percussive or textural) sounds.

Lexi emphasizes:

• Listening as the foundation (“90% of improv is listening”)

• Responding with clarity and confidence

• Harmony: creating two or more pitches together

• Rhythm: playing with pulse, accents, and shared timing

• Percussive vocalese: mouth-based rhythmic textures

• Counterpoint: independent layers that interact

This develops musical responsiveness and ensemble intuition.

 

5. Storytelling Through Sound

Participants explore narrative through qualities of sound—speed, intensity, and duration.

Guided prompts include:

• Inhaling the desire: using breath as anticipation or pull

• Exhaling into structure: stabilizing onto the skeleton or directing energy outward

Prompts may include:

• A feather falling from 100 stories high

• The life cycle of a butterfly

• The life cycle of a tree

• The hunt of a mountain lion

These exercises teach dancers to use sound as emotional and dramaturgical contour.

 

6. Performance Lab

The final portion invites dancers to apply their vocal discoveries to a structured narrative challenge. One example is an Aztec princess story, where participants must vocally highlight key dramatic moments of:

• Betrayal

• Sacrifice

• Being thrown or cast out

• The fisherman

• The resurrection of the skeleton woman

Dancers use breath, resonance, vocal textures, and group interplay to “solve” this short concept piece, resulting in a collectively crafted performance score.