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Many people stop singing somewhere along the way as they grow up...but most of those people miss singing. What’s up with that? How can we build a better society without music?
Founded by Liam Whitworth in the summer of 2025, Singing School is Future Prairie's ongoing vocal class, led by tenor Liam Whitworth and professional tenor opera singer Emmanuel "Onry" Henreid. Future Prairie Singing School is for anyone who wants to reconnect with their voice, including someone who sings constantly or someone who hasn't sung out loud since a church or middle school choir room decades ago! No audition, no experience, and no particular kind of voice is needed to join us WHATSOEVER. Bring yourself, your kindness, your fear, your dreams, and a willingness to make some kind of audible sound in a room full of other people! Each session works through breath, technique, and body awareness, the same fundamentals Onry uses in his own performance training, scaled down to something anyone can pick up. Across a full cycle of classes, the group works through a rotating set of themes: the physical mechanics of the voice and the muscles around the thyroid, the chakra system and what it has to do with singing in a group, pure vowel structure, and the more open-ended question of what it means to heal something through music instead of talking about it. Nobody has to attend every session in order for it to make sense. People sign up for one class or a whole season, and both work. Before anyone sings a note, the group agrees to a short list of house rules that shape the room as much as the vocal exercises do: listen with care, speak from your own experience, keep what's shared in the room in the room, make space for people who hold back and ask people who talk a lot to pause, and put their damn phones away! Onry Henreid is an award-winning singer, dancer, actor, and pianist who sings with the Oregon Symphony, Portland Opera, and American Repertory Theater. He studied music in Ukraine and Moldova and has performed across the US and Europe, in productions including The Black Clown, Madame Butterfly, Sanctuaries, an African American Requiem, Show Boat, Carmen, Faust, La Traviata, The Pirates of Penzance, and Hairspray. He's also an Albina native Every session is pay-what-you-can. Future Prairie suggests $22 to $44 per person as a range, but the actual goal is that money never decides who gets to learn to sing! If you can pay more, that covers someone who can't pay at all. Singing School spent its first year at Deep Waters, a wellness and spiritual-practice studio tucked into Lower Albina at 2710 N Interstate Avenue. It was a good home for a class built around breath and body: Deep Waters runs its own mix of meditation, qi gong, and wellness instruction. We are so grateful for our hosts, the Rahm family, for making room for us and donating this space for us to use! Singing School now meets regularly at Albina One, a 94-unit affordable housing development on N Flint Avenue, just north of the Moda Center. Albina One opened in September 2025, built by Albina Vision Trust and constructed by Colas Construction, a Black-owned firm, in one of the only major crane projects in Oregon history run by a Black-owned construction company! How cool is that? The building was built specifically to bring Black people home: most of its units are reserved for families with historic ties to Albina, many of them displaced decades ago when urban renewal and the construction of Interstate 5 tore through what was once home to 80 percent of Portland's Black population. Some residents moved in for the first time in forty years!
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