The Wildness & Precision® Course for Extraordinary Performance
Fall Cohort: September- December
Spring Cohort: February-May
Introduction
Four months of unprecedented performance training.
Twelve modules following the journey of performing from the desire to communicate all the way to sublime performance.
An intimate cohort of extraordinary performers that relentlessly nourish and support each other.
Precise coaching to elevate you beyond what you’ve imagined possible…
This is the Wildness and Precision Course for Extraordinary Performance.
This program is the culmination of all my work thus far in coaching elite performers, performing professionally, and research in areas of human design, vocal skill, storytelling, neurobiology, and human potential.
This level of training is unprecedented.
It is designed to be transformative and to collapse the timeline between what you can do now, and what you are fully capable of.
The course is inherently trans-disciplinary so the learning is immersive and exponential.
We work precisely with your bio-individuality, your artistry, and your desires.
Your design and desires are the blueprints we use to get you where you are meant to be with ease and grace.
This is not for you if you “sort of” want to improve.
This is for you if you are unstoppable, are ready for coaching that will expand and elevate you, and want to play deeply with other highly-skilled performers and creators.
About the Course
THE COURSE INCLUDES
12 Course Modules
12 Live Group Coaching sessions with Kate
Recorded replays of each coaching session
Exercises & Rehearsals to fast-track your mastery
Supplemental Materials, Suggested Reading, and Videos
An intimate, trans-disciplinary cohort of extraordinary performers
Support in the private What’sApp Discussion Forum
THE MODULES
The Modules provide deep work in voice, movement, optimal performance, skill-building and technical work, performance training, and extraordinary performance coaching.
Part I Optimal Performance
1. Wholeness of Performing
2. Breath Coordination & Skilled Breathing
3. Building Your Optimal Daily Practice
Part II Skill & Technique
4. Technical Work & Skill Building
5. Emergence & Optimal Performance Properties
6. Observation & Analysis of Movement
Part III Artistry
7. Interpreting the Senses
8. Acting & Emotion in Performance
9. Performance Preparation
Part IV Extraordinary Performance Training
10. Performance Readiness (Transforming Pre-Performance Energy)
11. Auditions & Recording
12. Synergizing & Integrating The Performance Process
THE COHORT
The intimate group cohort provides fertile ground for multi-dimensional learning, cross-pollination of disciplines, and an immersive environment that increases learning value exponentially.
And, as performers, it gives us something invaluable and essential to all performing- an audience.
THE SCHEDULE
The Wildness & Precision Course is 4 months long.
Lectures and coaching take place in the first 3 weeks of each month, with an integration week at the end of each month.
Days and times of live coaching sessions are determined by the availability of the participants as provided on your application form.
THE ALUMNI NETWORK
As an alumnx of the program, you are invited to a global network of people who explore, practice, and teach in a systemic, qualitative, and innovative way. The community allows you to meet and collaborate with all of the amazing performers who have participated in the program, and receive exclusive invitations to opportunities and events.
The Wildness & Precision Method
This is the training I wish every performer could have.
I Optimal Coordination
Cooperating with the design of your body, your art form, and the world gives you immediate, consistent access to your current skills and abilities. This step includes using your voice and body expertly and creating optimal acoustical and movement qualities immediately.
II Skill Mastery & Technical Work
In this area, we identify what further skills you might need to do your best work, and find ways to work at the leading edge of your abilities so you can do better and more precise work in service of your art. This pillar includes skill-building, refinement, and precise technical work.
III Performance Practices & Rehearsals
Here we work with text, character, rehearsal iterations, structure, and our entire biopsychosocial selves to create an integrated performing process.
IV Extraordinary Performance Coaching
This phase is about creative collaboration. We exchange ideas, create and develop work, and use short feedback loops to reveal the greatest, most essential performance. The artist is self-sufficient in their skills and coordination, and the coaching is synergistic and empowering.
The process is non-linear, and can use some or all pillars in combination and in any order.
About Kate Conklin
Kate Conklin is 6 feet 3 inches of pure, unadulterated resonance.
Kate is a soprano, a leading interpreter of the highly demanding vocal music of Bulgaria, and an extraordinary performance coach. Kate is a certified Integrative Alexander Technique teacher and holds a BFA and MFA in Vocal Performance, with emphasis in opera, contemporary, free improvisation, North Indian Classical, and Balkan vocal music. She has been performing live and in recordings, television, and film for over three decades.
Kate was a Fulbright Scholar to Bulgaria, where she studied singing, pedagogy, and conducting, and performed as a member of The Ivan Spassov Academic Choir. Kate was also the vocalist for Cirque du Soleil’s “O,” where she performed approximately 900 shows, and was subsequently brought on to teach at the California Institute of the Arts, where she served as vocal faculty, as well as founding and directing the Bulgarian Vocal Ensembles. She has taught and guest lectured at more than 20 educational institutions and arts programs.
Kate’s unique methodology, Wildness & Precision®, is the process that has emerged from decades of coaching the best performers in the world and deep study in the fields of optimal performance, optimal acoustics, flow state, stress physiology, neurobiology, systems theory, Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization, anthropology, philosophy, and creativity.
Kate coaches acrobats, artists, opera singers, athletes, entrepreneurs, directors, and performers of all kinds to create the conditions for consistent optimal performance, skilled mastery, and unprecedented performance so they can achieve the precision, quality, and longevity they desire and deserve.
Kate sings in 17+ languages and is known for her playful gravitas.
Watch Kate’s TedX Talk/Performance
Testimonials
“I have found the Course to be an invaluable, synchronistic blend of exactly the information I want to have access to as a professional performer. Kate has a knack for presenting dense, scientific material in a usable, and more importantly, efficient and accessible manner. While some of the information I may have run across in previous studies, the way it is combined and presented here has been responsible for multiple breakthroughs just in the duration of the Course. Most of the material, however, has been new to me and immensely interesting — and important in creating fluidity and efficiency between the constraints of my instrument and what I want to say and do in performance. I am excited to see what further review and deeper study on my part will bring as I integrate new understandings with the demands of what I do on and off stage.”
Rainelle Krause
Soprano & Aerialist
“This has been an extremely rich and creatively nurturing four months, which has taken me on a profound artistic journey.
When I first heard of the Course, it was mysterious. Having worked with Kate before, I knew that this rourse would bring a positive injection to my work, but I had no idea how deeply it would delve into the very core of my art and my processes and how profoundly it would affect my relationship to my voice and vocal practice. Through this course, I have discovered an entirely new dimension to my work.
The Course has revealed a revolutionary way of looking at singing, performance, and everything in life, both subtle yet extraordinarily profound. It has given me a deeper level of engagement with all aspects of my professional musical practice, the extent to which I had not thought possible. I’ve realised that there is an untapped well of potential to my vocal work – that there is a capacity well beyond what I ever expected, not just for simple enjoyment – but for bliss and the deepest level of satisfaction with my creative world.
I’ve been singing all my life – the journey of which has largely felt easy and enjoyable – but implementing some of Kate’s ideas had instant results that I’ve never experienced before. In the first week, I discovered resonance for the first time in my life, and it made me jump out of my skin. I’ve unlocked incredible possibilities with my voice. I do not want to go back to doing it any other way. It’s amazing to me that someone would be able to show me something so new about a part of myself which I know so intimately!
This work is profoundly playful, dynamic, and imaginative. Kate really embraces the creative nature of the craft and responds to my own personal discovery. This is about the deepest kind of curiosity and fun!
Now I have finished the Course, I feel there is so much to reflect upon and integrate in just 16 weeks. I’ve discovered so much about my own processes through watching others be coached. It has enabled me to appreciate the process in a really three-dimensional way. I hadn’t appreciated this before.
Kates lectures covered every aspect of a professional singer’s life from surprising and insightful perspectives. When I first started the Course I wasn’t sure that I needed to build a foundation to my practice. The word foundation can be associated with beginnings. Now I have completed the Course, I understand that the ‘foundation’ built here is about revealing deeper levels of understanding around our processes, our human design and our creative nature. It’s very hard to put into words. It is like digging deeper into the ground and realising the nature of the very ground upon which you are standing.
Each lecture had me furiously note-taking; they were brimming with revolutionary insights pointing to a fundamental shift in thinking around how we work as artists and as humans. Kate’s research reveals principles both mysterious and highly scientific, and instantly ready to implement in immediately practical ways.
This work is entirely holistic and has affected all areas of my life, offering me a deeper level of sensitivity towards the way I think and the way I move and everything in between – I’ve had countless daily insights from everything to how I tense my tongue when I run, to how I can better cooperate with emotional challenges.
Alongside this new foundational shift, I have gained an extraordinary array of playful and creative experiments that I can continue to play with. I have a brand new way of working that I know can accompany me through any artistic endeavour.
I feel as excited as I first did when I was a child, first setting out on my singing training, full of the new possibilities available to me.
I didn’t realise I had plateaued with my singing work until I did this course. The coaching each week has been so precious – having a place to share my work and ask questions has been so valuable. Life as a professional can be isolating and feel competitive. The coaching has been such a gift, sharing in successes, feeling free to show our private processes, feeling unified, and held as a group and feeling part of a very special community.
I cannot express my gratitude at having had this experience. I know that nothing can be the same from now on.
Jump. You won’t regret it.”
Mae Karthauser
Singer, Composer, Pianist, Educator, Director of the Totnes Bulgarian Choir
“What I have been exposed to in this Course has been exceptional. To think that I am currently enjoying a library of what Kate has spent years of her life testing, teaching, and using in her own amazing performance background is really unbelievable.
Kate has the ability to, in a condensed time period with a clear map, lead someone out of the safe end of the pool and into the deep. She really breaks down what is possible in trying to gain greater mastery over this instrument we call “voice” which is really body, heart, and mind. She teaches you to find choices and not just become a victim of old habits and thought patterns.
A lifelong singer and performer, I am grateful for a style of teaching that is so grounded in a different kind of science. Rooted in deep listening to your own intuition and inherent knowledge, it has also given me new ways of looking at what I’m trying to accomplish, sometimes radically new and I have test driven those tools in concert and in the studio with great results.”
Pam Tillis
Multiple CMA and Grammy Award-winning Singer, Songwriter, Broadway performer & member of The Grand Ole Opry
“Kate Conklin’s Course has been an amazing experience for me. The information has been laid out in a very systematic, easy-to-learn style, with practical applications from the very first lesson onward. I have personally made revelations that have made an enormous difference in my physical comfort both in singing and in life. The approach is rooted in science, and yet not in any way dry or difficult to understand because Kate has broken it down into manageable parts. The lectures are very informative, but they are so much more than a laundry list of facts, as they also have suggestions of exercises to play with the information discussed, and all of those have been great. I have also loved the group sessions because seeing my colleagues play with these concepts has been so helpful in my visceral understanding of them all. I consider this one of the best investments I have made in my singing and would recommend it to any serious performer interested in continuing to grow. “
Anita Lyons
Soprano
“This Course introduces the most efficient and logical approach to singing, and could greatly benefit any singer. It is programmed perfectly to present challenges and new concepts that can be explored immediately with any repertoire while maintaining thoughtful, digestible steps, and never becoming overwhelming. One particular component of the program is live coaching with the group each week, which has ended up being my favorite part! I was not only able to work through specific questions I had when applying the Course to my own practice but also found myself investigating the other members’ topics of discussion as well each week. This course has done SO MUCH good for my technique, my performance, and my whole approach to singing (and therefore, my whole self… Oh just wait, guys!). I could not recommend it enough!”
Rebecca Richardson
Soprano
“As a professional singer and performer of over 25 years who has had her share of struggles with technical issues (vocal fatigue, stamina, etc), working with Kate Conklin has been absolutely invaluable. Her particular approach, using principles of the Alexander Technique, is simply wonderful. It is a way of looking at practice and performance through the lens of anatomical function wedded to psychological intention. The resulting vocal freedom and vocal stamina are palpable!
I like the structure of the Course, with recorded lectures that are always accessible online to watch/listen to, mixed with the live coaching where a participant can both work on some material in real-time and observe others doing so. Both are so useful! Kate also provides reading material and references to complete the picture.
Highly valuable and much appreciated. Thank you, Kate, for creating this course!!!!”
Dina Emerson
Vocalist– Meredith Monk Ensemble, Cirque du Soleil
“I particularly enjoy the group coaching. Hearing other people’s challenges and triumphs helps shake up my own assumptions and give me a wider range of vocabulary and experience to draw from. It’s been a wonderful community to connect with and I walk away from each lecture and coaching session, energized and ready for more. I’ve really benefitted from the structured, weekly meetings as they continuously build on skills and ideas allowing me to make greater improvements in a much shorter period of time. I wish I could give this experience to everyone!”
Madison Smith
Soprano
“Kate Conklin’s Course has reinvigorated my practicing. Listening to the lessons on my own time, and then applying discoveries engaged the “why” of music-making again. The weekly coachings allowed for observations to expand further through conversations with other artists in a safely guided peer environment. It served as a welcome weekly reminder to continue questioning and re-examining preconceived notions of “the right way” when it comes to artistic expression. I highly recommend any opportunity to walk with Kate on the path to personal artistic discovery.”
Sara Stejskel
Soprano