Singing School was a 20-week social practice art series facilitated by Liam Whitworth and taught by Portland Opera singer and multidisciplinary performer Onry H.

Hosted weekly at Deep Waters studio, the program invited participants to explore collective voice work as a form of healing and reconnection. Attendance was free and open to the public. Each session emphasized community, embodiment, and the rediscovery of joy through singing together at a beginners' level after years of pandemic-era isolation.

The project sought to transform vocal practice into a medium for collective repair. Drawing from traditions of communal song, somatic healing, and queer performance, Singing School treated the act of singing not as entertainment but as ritual and restoration. The series asked how a group of strangers might breathe together, attune to one another’s resonance, and create temporary harmony as a form of mutual regulation.

Participants gathered in a modest upstairs studio in Lower Albina. Each session began with grounding exercises in breath and posture, followed by playful explorations of tone, vowel, and vibration. Onry guided participants in connecting the voice to the body’s energy centers, with particular attention to the throat and heart. Gradually, individuals who began the series shy or hesitant grew into full, unguarded vocal expression. 

Singing School succeeded as a work of social practice art. It reimagined performance as participatory care, replacing spectacle with shared process. Participants described feeling “open,” “lighter,” and “less alone.” Several returned week after week, forming an informal collective that continued to meet after the series ended.
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As an artistic experiment, Singing School demonstrated that creative acts can operate as public health interventions. In the wake of COVID-19, it offered an embodied space for processing collective PTSD and rekindling communal joy. The project advanced Future Prairie’s mission to center working-class queer artists in civic healing work, while deepening Deep Waters’ identity as a site for art that nurtures rather than extracts. We hope to host more events that build community resilience through shared practice.

Most of our Future Prairie events are sliding scale, and people sometimes ask us what that means and how they should think about how much to pay.

These are the current American classes, as we see them: 

• Poor means you are stuck in constant survival mode. Almost nothing you do can create real stability.  
• Working class means one serious problem can push you into poverty. A job loss, illness, or emergency is enough to undo everything.
• Middle class means it takes more than one thing going wrong to become poor. As long as you can keep working, you can usually stay okay.
• Affluent, or upper middle class, means only something truly catastrophic would make you poor. If you keep working and have some good luck, you might even become rich.
• Rich means there is basically nothing that can make you poor. You do not need to work to survive.

A recent 75-minute Future Prairie class was offered for $22-$44. We trust you to think about where you fall on that scale and pay accordingly.

An example of what someone might pay could be: 

• Poor - $22
• Working class - $26 
• Middle class - $34
• Affluent - $40
• Rich - $44