Meike Clarelli

Musician and vocal researcher with a diverse background ranging from music, theater, and poetry. He graduated in 2001 from the Emilia Romagna Teatri School for Actors in Modena, where he worked with directors and actors such as: Monica Klinger, Cesar Brie, Raffaella Giordano, Stefano Vercelli, Magda Siti, Mamadou Dioume.
He is attending the University of Contemporary Music and Jazz, at the Frescobaldi Conservatory of Ferrara.
He later studied singing and vocal pedagogy with Imke Buchholz McMurtrie (Germany), folk/ethnic singing with Germana Giannini, and began in 2001 with Elisa Benassi a course of study on psychophonetic singing and psychophony.
In 2004 he studied Sufi singing with music-therapist Alev Naqiba Kowalez. He studied Chinese music and Er Ou (traditional violin) with Master Wong in China. From 2003 to 2007 he studied opera singing with teacher Paola Matarrese. He has studied classical guitar, martial arts and Chinese medicine and has a background in psychoanalysis.
He has developed in recent years a methodology for working on the voice called Sensitive Singing which he has been teaching in Modena since 2004, in Bologna since 2015 and of which he holds seminars in various cities in Italy.

In 2008 she founded the Women’s Choir “Le Chemin des Femmes,” consisting of Italian women together with women from various parts of the world, which she still directs.
The same year he founded the music group 
La Metralli
, in which she is a singer and composer, winner of the 2012 Ciampi Prize and selected for the 2014 Tenco Prize.  Since 2016 he has joined as a singer and multi-instrumentalist in the music collective Two Winds which blends improvised music with electronic, jazz, contemporary and rock music.
Since 2014 he has been a member of the Collective Amigdala who produces perfomative installation works, as a sound dramaturge and is co-director artistic director of the 
Peripheral Festival
.

“I like it because the image it brings out is of a diversity society that is politically new and of resistance through voice.”

– Benedetta

“It gave me the joy of life, Le Chemin des Femmes is a combination of madness, anarchy and joy.”

– Lisa

“I remember once in the early days we got into Meike’s panda in a dozen or so and sang around the block at the Women’s House in Modena.”

– Ernestine

“Meike urges us to bring out the crazy part of us: I once in the improvisation sniffed my armpit with a passionate gesture, and it’s a gesture that we have even replayed at the Modena Conservatory.”
– Luciana

“We bought white and blonde wigs following the teaching of our African friends.” 

– Maria Elena

“At one concert, to promote our CD, I used to pull it out from under my skirt.”

– Gabriella

“It took us many years to understand the different attitude of African women toward ‘rehearsing’: for them singing is spontaneous, playful, irreverent, sensual even when it has a spiritual and religious meaning. And in such a view for them, rehearsals are meaningless: you sing by living in the moment – and that’s it!“
– Meike

“We call ourselves anarchists, more because of our habit of doing things instinctively and passionately. Meike is capable of twisting a song during the rehearsal before a concert, making us panic! Our strength I think is the energy we convey as a group, able to cope with change with confidence in our director’s artistic gaze and our resilience…it is these aspects that create a kind of magic that accompanies us to every concert, despite our ‘bananas’ (a term coined with Ghanaian friends to define mistakes).”
– Maria Elena

“I like this union of cultures because it creates a new identity, and that in itself is art.”

–

Benedetta

“I liked it right away because of this spontaneity and taste of thrill, creating something beautiful and meaningful from making do.”

– Fulvia

“It’s a different, non-traditional choir that experiments and mixes different skills, cultures, and manages to get the best result.”

– Alexandra

“I came in to sing with some freedom of expression, and I like it because we do crazy things without giving much importance to technique.”

–

Georgina

“We share in a space of freedom on another level of the deep things that bind us anyway, the emotional energy of being among women, connected to roots, to nature.”

– Luciana

“Working on the voice founds its own sound identity and collectively gives itself as a female identity, strong and almost warrior-like. These women are alive and are able to channel it into song; we found a way to show this beauty they have in singing.”

– Meike

Le Chemin des Femmes works with improvisation and vocal polyphony, using voices as instruments
.

Rehearsals are also a time of composition from which experimental pieces are constructed that speak of the freedom of human beings, particularly women.

The repertoire at first drew from the cultural and musical substrate that each woman in the course of the meetings freely delivered to the group and that Meike rearranged. Over the years, contaminations from the pop world and contemporary music have also been added: today the choir sings songs that draw from the Ghanaian tradition to Brazilian and Afro-American, classical, pop and punk, in a mixture of melodies and popular themes from different geographical and cultural origins .

Le Chemin des Femmes benefits from the valuable collaboration of musician Davide Fasulo, who helps arrange the songs and writes the scores.

How crazy is that? The choir has a director who as a true artist is really crazy, but the individual singers are no less! Le Chemin des Femmes seeks to break conformity, sometimes with irreverent actions, giving birth to a style outside the lines, intended to be not only artistic expression, but also political and cultural.

The Cores – unruly voices

 is a young women’s choir born in Bologna from the vocal workshop organized by the
Jaya Association
, which gathers the experience and repertoire of Le Chemin des Femmes, declining it with its own strongly feminist, combative and intergenerational sensibility in the Bologna area. Together they bring to life a cohort in its rich and plural complexity of women of different generations, cultures, backgrounds, sexual orientation and social backgrounds.

The two choirs have been collaborating for years in the realization of special projects, concerts, moments of training and research. They are like a single choir made up of two souls who feel at the same time the forces and thrusts of the territories they belong to: Modena and Bologna.