Voice Movement . Life
Encounter...
finding inspiration ANd new ways of being.
AWAKEN...
creating questions and new ways oF knowing.
integrate...
weaving practice and
new ways of connecting.
VOICE MOVEMENT . LIFE
Voice unites thought and feeling and is a mirror of our lived experience, reflective of our relationship with ourselves and with others in the world around us.
Voice Movement . Life emerges out of this inextricable connection between the voice, the bodymind, and the psyche; the embodied voice is at the very centre of who we are and how we feel.
At Voice Movement . Life we are passionate about sharing and researching new ways of exploring the embodied voice as an essential element of our evolving identity, and as a profound approach to healing, building community, and to cultivating a beautiful life.
Our work is rooted in the expressive arts therapy modality of Voice Movement Therapy and aims to contribute to the further development and global expansion of its practice.
ENCOUNTER
THROUGH PRACTICE
Self-knowledge Redefined
At Voice Movement . Life we facilitate curated experiential opportunities to ignite a sense of radical aliveness and joyful possibility through creativity and connection.
ENCOUNTER are immersive multimodal expressive arts experiences that are inspired by nature, culturally meaningful places, and our stories. We open space and time to nourish the senses, ground the self, and explore new ways of being. Through embodied and expressive pathways, participants are invited into the landscapes of the psyche to explore imagination, personal meaning-making, and their authentic voice.
Our ENCOUNTER offerings provide safe spaces of respect and witnessing, a crucible that supports moving through emotion and experience. We encourage the liberation of voice and self thus promoting the evolution of the individual and the imagining of new possibilities for ourselves, our communities, and the world.
For those who are ready to dive into a transformative and sometimes sacred process, ENCOUNTER invites you to return 'home' through embodied creative inquiry that connects us more deeply to self and other and inspires an energy of expansion and an experience of somatic aliveness.
This is where soul evolves.
INSPIRE. INHALE. IMPROVISE.
INTERWEAVE. INVITE. INDIVIDUATE...
AWAKEN
THROUGH RESEARCH
Knowledge as living, breathing landscape
At Voice Movement . Life we are deeply curious about body knowledge and how creativity in community unfolds into something powerfully healing. We inquire through embodied, arts-based, autoethnographic research to explore new ways of knowing, sensing, understanding, and AWAKENING human experience.
AWAKEN examines our assumptions and explores alternatives, looking more deeply at the relationships between experience, theory, and practice and how these are connected to people and communities. We ask questions that challenge the status quo, test ideas, and deepen our imaginings of what is possible when creative and embodied practices are brought into people's lives and regarded as living knowledge.
Our drive towards deeper understanding, meaningful insight, and better practice leads our AWAKEN explorations and evolves our practice as we uncover what works best and for whom. Voice remains an important strand of this inquiry. We are particularly interested in what becomes possible when the voice is understood not simply as sound, but as an embodied expression of self, identity, relationship, and psyche.
Through books, blogs, articles, videos, and podcasts, we share what we discover through our research and practice, making knowledge more accessible to a global audience. AWAKEN connects ideas, experiences, and emerging insights while creating space for people to explore their own stories. We highlight the human experience of sensing, expanding, finding authentic voice, and discovering new possibilities, showing how this work can enrich and transform individuals, communities, and practice.
INNOVATE. INSIGHT. INTRIGUE. INVERT.
INVESTIGATE. INVENT. INFUSE...
INTEGRATE THROUGH EXPERIENCE
Embodied Knowledge in Practice
At Voice Movement . Life we are committed to the global expansion and accessibility of the expressive arts as a transformational and healing practice. INTEGRATE provides workshops, courses, and programs for expressive arts therapy practitioners, psychologists, body-oriented and somatic practitioners, community arts practitioners, and other allied professionals so that sharing our voice-centred approach to self-expression becomes possible.
As our work evolves through our own practice, research, experiential learning, and collaborations, so too does our teaching. Our workshops, courses, and programs share our evolving approach, enabling practitioners to engage with the work, develop their own embodied understanding, and INTEGRATE these practices from lived experience into their professional and creative contexts.
Our INTEGRATE approach to education is hands-on and experiential and all our programs are offered in person. Programs are tailored for specific groups and the duration varies depending on the aims and objectives.
INTERACT. INTERCONNECT. INTERSECT.
INCORPORATE. INTEGRAL. ILLUMINATE.
Meet the team &
connect with us
Voice Movement . Life co-founder, Li Parker, is an internationally registered Voice Movement Therapy practitioner, theatre maker, drama educator and creative facilitator whose work explores the meeting point between embodied voice, movement, imagination, cultural narrative and the human psyche. Her practice has developed across theatre, education, therapeutic work and expressive arts, with a particular interest in how creative and embodied experience can reconnect us with ourselves, with one another and with the places and cultures that shape us.
With an extensive background in theatre making and drama teaching, Li has a particular gift for bringing the inner world into tangible form. She works with images, stories, metaphor and material from the imagination, translating them into three-dimensional creative and performance experiences through voice, movement, drawing, writing, improvisation, objects and other multimodal arts practices. Theatre provides an important foundation for her work: a space in which story, body, image, voice and relationship can meet and become something alive.
As a Voice Movement Therapy practitioner, Li has extensive experience facilitating groups and individuals through deeply personal embodied processes. Her therapeutic work invites participants to explore the singing and sounding body as a source of sensation, feeling, memory, imagination and authentic expression. Voice becomes a way of listening inwardly as well as communicating outwardly, opening possibilities for a more intimate relationship with self and others.
A significant strand of Li’s practice is her exploration of cultural narrative, mythology, indigenous knowledge and place. She is particularly interested in how stories held within cultures and landscapes can inform contemporary experience and help us reconsider our relationship with land, history, identity and community. In South Africa, she has developed collaborative relationships with local elders and traditional knowledge holders, exploring ways of honouring the histories and cultural narratives of place while creating meaningful connections with the communities of the present.
Her creative practice is informed by a deep curiosity about the possibilities that emerge when 'the wisdom of culture meets the intelligence of the body and the beauty of artistic expression.' She explores how singing, movement, image, story and other creative forms can create embodied experiences of belonging, connection and meaning.
Li has also contributed to the international development and visibility of Voice Movement Therapy. As Development Lead for the Norma G. Canner Foundation for Voice Movement Therapy, she has supported the dissemination of VMT through media, communications, professional networks and publishing, including the promotion of Singing the Psyche: Uniting Thought and Feeling Through the Voice: Voice Movement Therapy in Practice. She has presented VMT at expressive arts and professional conferences internationally, sharing her explorations of voice, environment, psyche, culture and embodied creative practice.
Her work is ultimately an invitation to enter the creative process with curiosity: to listen to what the body knows, to give form to what the imagination reveals, and to discover how voice, story, movement and culture might open new ways of relating to ourselves, one another and the world we inhabit.
Voice Movement . Life co-founder, Gina Holloway Mulder, is an internationally registered Voice Movement Therapy practitioner, researcher, educator, author, and creative practitioner whose interdisciplinary work explores the intersection of embodied voice, somatic experience, creativity and psychological inquiry as a dynamic learning strategy applicable across diverse contexts. Her research, teaching and practice centre on how embodied voice and creativity can offer empowerment, liberation and healing, with particular attention to the way in which voice functions as both an acoustic and metaphorical expression of self that leads to truth.
Gina's grounding in devised theatre, creative movement and performance art, bring a strong visual and aesthetic sensibility to her work. Mythology, symbol and archetype are recurring sources of inspiration, offering avenues for exploring how images and stories held within the psyche might be embodied, voiced and brought into lived experience, and for investigating how that which is held in the body and voice can, likewise, be brought into awareness through song, dance, image, and story. Her arts-based autoethnographic research, Integrating Voice Movement Therapy and Maskwork for Performer Vocal Development: Voicing the Mask to De-mask the Voice, investigated the innate relationship between subpersonalities, vocal expression, and somatic experience, and developed a structured practitioner-led process for deep vocal and personal exploration of psyche and soma.
Apart from group facilitation, Gina offers curated private retreats and individual journeys. These intimate experiences draw on multimodal creative practices to accompany people into the landscapes of their own psyche. Voice remains the central thread, while movement, image, drawing, writing, mask making, sculpting, improvisation, active imagination and nature provide different pathways into experience and healing. Her practice is deeply somatically attuned, attending to the subtle felt sense of the body and the ways experience moves between sensation, emotion, image, sound and meaning.
Gina has made a significant contribution to the developing literature and professional community of VMT. She has designed programs for and lectured at seven South African universities, contributed to VMT practitioner education internationally, and offered workshops in China, Malaysia and Australia and online programs for expressive arts therapists and adjunct practitioners in Australia, NewZealand, Canada, USA , Sweden and Colombia. She has served multiple terms on the Board of the International Association for Voice Movement Therapy and contributed as an editor and writer to its professional journal.
Her published works include ‘Voice as Archive in Devising Theatre’ and ‘Towards a Living Harmony: Voice Movement Therapy as an Instrument of Change in South Africa’ in Singing the Psyche: Uniting Thought and Feeling Through the Voice: Voice Movement Therapy in Practice (Charles C. Thomas, 2023), which she co-edited with Anne M. Brownell and Deirdre A. Brownell. Extending the ideas explored through her research into a wider interdisciplinary conversation about masks, identity, expression and the healing arts, she authored ‘Integrating Voice Movement Therapy and Mask Work and Why It Works’ published in The Expressive Use of Masks Across Cultures and Healing Arts (Routledge, 2024).
Gina's work brings research, teaching, creative practice and embodied exploration into dialogue. At its heart is a conviction that the felt experience of the voice is inseparable from the experience of being human: a potent means of encountering the self, relating to others, and exploring the deeper questions of meaning, connection, and what it means to be embodied and alive.
