Ann Mortifee, Musical Shaman

by Lisa Tant
Originally published in BC WOMAN Magazine August 1997

A 17, West Vancouver singer/songwriter Ann Mortifee discovered her calling when her improvised songs from the play Ecstasy of Rita Joe moved the audience to tears. It was that awakening that led Mortifee, now 48, to use music not as a star vehicle, but rather as a healing tool to drive herself and others down a path of self-discovery. Mortifee’s own course has taken her from a Zululand cradle to Indian ashrams, to New York’s bright lights, and now to her home in the North Shore mountains. Over the past three decades, she’s forged a celebrated career by constantly straying from the straight-and-narrow and into uncharted personal territory.

Twice, she walked away from the promise of international stardom after earning reviewers’ praise for her performances in plays and musical scores. “I felt like I had been offered the world in New York, but I just couldn’t go down that road. I knew that something deeper was calling me.” That instinct has unfolded over the last decade during which Mortifee had a child (Devon, 9), and became world renowned as a musical healer. In 1992, she was presented with an Order of Canada. “My own healing has become my work,” she says, as a trio of finches chirp in the back-ground. Her holistic workshops – first launched nine years ago at Hollyhock Farm on Cortez Island – Mortifee uses music to “contact your deeper feelings and your own value in life.” “Musical ability and self-confidence are inseparable,” she says. “You can have tremendous talent but if you’re shut down emotionally, it can’t get out.”

Another detour along her musical highway was David Feinstein, a California psychologist who listened to her music while writing Rituals for Living and Dying. He approached her to write an album, “Serenade at the Doorway”, for people facing death. “I was in the middle of a middle-age crisis,” she recalls. “I realized that it doesn’t matter what the death is – the death of a dream, marriage or youth – all of these transitions are hard to make.” Without marketing, the album found its way into cancer, AIDS, and palliative care clinics, and steered Mortifee down another life-forming path.

Music as a healing tool became Mortifee’s message at global conferences and workshops for caretakers of the dying.

One of the album’s tracks, “I Won’t Stay Silent Any Longer”, became an anthem for survivors of sexual abuse, and forced her to face her own childhood abuse at the hands of a gardener. “It made me realize that everything in life is a two-edged sword. One of my deepest woundings is turning out to be one of the gifts I bring to help others. The experience becomes part of your story as opposed to this dreaded secret and dark place of pain that you can’t share with anybody.”

“Music has been my therapist, my friend, my consolation,” she says. “Every person should have a creative outlet – whether that be painting or baking muffins – every person needs a place to pour their soul.”

Mortifee’s latest work is a Phantom-scale semi-autobiographical musical called “When the Rains Come”. A love story set in South Africa, its characters mirror her own inner struggles. While searching for a major production company, she’s also working on the book version of “Serenade at the Doorway” with Feinstein. Perhaps it’s because stardom’s bright lights are twinkling again that Mortifee insists she’s heading into an other soul-searching hiatus. “Yet,” she says, “if you’re absolutely sure of who you are, and where you’re going, then chances are you’ve wrapped your life up in a package and you’re set in your ways. If you don’t get trapped in being depressed about self-doubt – if you can share the discomfort – it becomes a natural part of being human. I’m committed to finding purpose in life. In pursuit of that purpose, you’re living that purpose.”

Facing the Challenge with Song

A Workshop Experience with Ann Mortifee
by Cecil Hershler
Originally published in REHABILITATION DIGEST / SUMMER 1989  Reproduced here by permission of the author.

A single note becomes a song
A single tree becomes a forest
A single voice that’s clear and strong
Can turn into a worldwide chorus

In 1982, while living in Hamilton, Ontario, I was first introduced to the singing voice of Ann Mortifee. A friend of mine had seen her on T.V. and suggested that I go to a concert of hers at Hamilton Place. The fact that Ann Mortifee was born in South Africa, as I was, increased my interest and curiosity. Crouched in the top row of the upper balcony, I was astonished and moved by a voice that carried throughout the auditorium and seemed not to need even the assistance of a microphone. After the show I went behind stage and convinced the stagehands to arrange a meeting for me with Ann. As we stood and reminisced about our common roots, it seemed as if we had been friends for a long time.

In 1985, I started working as a specialist in physical medicine and rehabilitation at the G.F. Strong Rehabilitation Centre in Vancouver British Columbia. Approximately two years later, my wife noticed that Ann Mortifee was giving her first workshop which she called “Releasing the Inner Voice” and which, at first glance, appeared to be an attempt to assist people in releasing their inhibitions with regard to singing in public. I enrolled in this workshop which was held on Cortes Island (one of the islands off the coast of Vancouver) and found that Ann was not just a gifted musician and songwriter, but also a natural facilitator. She was not only able to create an atmosphere that encouraged participants to risk singing, she also helped people to release feelings and thoughts that related to the reasons they were inhibited.

As a clinician, I was struck by the therapeutic potential of this workshop environment and I became interested in evaluating the effect of such an experience on participants who were physically disabled. Ann enthusiastically agreed to support my endeavours. In June 1988,I was able to obtain financial assistance from the Rotary Club of Vancouver and rented space in an old Tudor house located near Jericho Beach. It was wheelchair accessible. After advertising by word of mouth, we finally put together agroup of 20 participants. Ten of these had no apparent physical disability, while the remainder had physical challenges that included spinal cord injury, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, polio myelitis and partial sight. The workshop was conducted over a weekend and arrangements were made for participants to return home each evening.

Day 1: Friday Evening, September 9

Initially the group appeared awkward and restrained. It seemed as if each participant had come for a different reason and felt vulnerable as a result. For Ann, the workshop was an opportunity to help people experience a now level of personal expression:
“Getting more of our insides onto the outside so that when we are singing or performing or just expressing our selves in life, there is more personal power, comfort, safety and strength.”

Dianne, who was a family therapist, and had a spinal cord injury and a walking disability, was there because she had a deep sense of the connection between the body and the spirit and a conviction that feelings trapped in the body could be helped by the voice. She also found that, in spite of the walking disability, she could dance to music better than she could walk.

Louis was quadriparetic as a result of a rugby injury in 1977. In recent years, he had been studying pro fessional singing and had been per forming since 1978. He had come because he found it difficult to study and perform in a world where he was in the minority. He found it particularly difficult to get up on stage with his disability, and felt that he held many issues inside which would benefit from open expression.
Pat, who had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, felt drawn to the workshop. She had been a music therapist for 17 years and had worked with Elisabeth Kubler Ross. In the last few years, as her musical voice had weakened, she had begun to withdraw and had cut herself off from her family, friends and her former profession.

After introductions were com pleted, the group was asked to chant the names of each person in sequence. ‘This is a way to learn names, but at the same time it is a way to actually contact a person. When I’m giving a concert, my primary urge is to communicate, it is to actually connect with someone and feel them and have them know me, you know . . . So in saying somebody’s name, it is an incredibly personal experience and to actually give a part of yourself away in your voice, because that’s when the voice gets charged, when you’re in it.’

Already, on that first Friday evening, we had begun to take risks. Each person in the group was asked to sing, totally on his or her own, either a phrase, part of a song, or a whole song. Singing bypasses the intellect, enables one to get in touch with deeper kelings and emotions. That evening we went home feeling somewhat more comfortable with each other, but still tentative.

Day 2: Saturday, September 10

On Saturday morning, a feeling of bonding within the group began to emerge. Some had never known each other before and were beginning to relax and feel safe. Vocal and breathing exercises as well as visualization helped relax and promote communication.

n Saturday afternoon, people began to talk about their feelings. Michael, who was quadriplegic, felt that the emotions of anger, frustration and all the negatives did not need to be acknowledged. Otherwise it could become a habit. Ann responded that, rather than denying negative feelings of anger and frustration, one should use the energy of such strong feelings in order to activate oneself. In other words, we should be talking about how to transform feelings of anger and frustration into positive action. Ann felt strongly that there is a place within each one of us where nothing is denied and everything is accepted, and that once this place is reached, freedom becomes available. The positive feature of owning our anger is that it allows us to recognize our own passion.

Veronica, who had no apparent physical disability, spoke of how she, as a relatively younger woman, was married to a man who was 40 years older than herself and who was now dying. She expressed with great emotion to the group how her life felt slowed down, cut off and arid, and yet she knew that she had chosen her situation and that it had not been thrust on her as those with trauma induced physical disabilities.

Kerris, who had suffered brain injury and hemiparesis, shared that the most difficult part of life was trying to adjust to what everybody else wanted or expected of her.

By the end of the day it was apparent to everyone that it did not matter whether one had a physical disability or not. The quest for meaning and joy in life was a common aspiration among all people. Saturday’s session ended with the group singing together. A feeling of closeness pervaded the room.

Day 3: Sunday, September 11

On Sunday morning, the group was close and more supportive than ever with each other. Many of the participants began to share themselves with intimacy and great feeling. Sunday was exceptionally powerful for Pat. She was the young woman with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis who two years ago began to exhibit the same symptoms as her father. He had died only two months before the workshop. Pat shared how, as she had become weaker in the past few years, she had gradually lost contact with people who had been close to her. She and her life partner had separated six months previously at her request because she felt that he would want to be with someone who was healthy and who could move and do the things that she couldn’t do. He then married her closest friend. She had been a music therapist but, because she had lost 2 1/2 octaves from her vocal range, she felt that she no longer had value and so had stopped singing altogether. With the group encouraging her, Pat then sang a song that she had written:

‘Last night I thought that this was it
I’ve seen this world
There’s nothing left
So I closed my eyes and my ears to life
And I waited for my final breath

Keep on coming
I’m moving along
Into the world
We can do anything

This world, it’s hard
It’s hard to figure out
It’s light and it’s dark I have no room

I must start out
On my road to die….’

At the end of the song, each person in the group felt profoundly moved and intimately connected with Pat’s pain. Pat’s final declaration of her love for her father and former partner represented for me the essence of healing, and each person in the group saw the possibility for themselves of healing their own wounds. Pat’s final words were:

‘I want to be a part of what this is. I believe in the power of music. I know and I respect it. And I think if anything can change the world it is going to be through people using music.’

Since this workshop, a presentation has been made at the G.F. Strong Rehabilitation Centre which was warmly received. In view of the fact that this workshop was experimental, involving a small sample of people in a special set of circumstances, we are now working on a proposal to introduce such a workshop program into the conventional rehabilitation process. A key factor in the proposal would be the creation of a long-term follow-up process after workshops, to help people deal with some of the psychological wounds such an experience can open up.

Therapy utilizing music has been going on for many years and this workshop illustrates again how the voice can be used to assist people in releasing deep feelings and becoming more aware of their own potential. Seventy and 30-minute videos of the workshop have been made and are now available for those who are interested.

What difference does such a workshop make? It obviously has immediate short-term effects. It also appears to have a carry-over. Pat, for example, has changed her lifestyle since the workshop and has begun to record her music and write her auto-biography. Her attitude has become more positive and this has continued for the past months.

‘You and I are one

We are simply just one voice

One single voice

If you say you can

Well then you can

You can.’

Dr. Cecil Hershler is a specialist in physical medicine and rehabilitation. His specialty is pain management. His office can be reached at (604) 732-7060.

email: chershler@home.com

Women’s Conference

COCHRANE THIS WEEK in THE COCHRANE TIMES Tuesday, October 28, 1976
by Marina Endicott

WOMEN GATHER AT WHC (excerpt)

Through songs and stories, women from the Cochrane area and from the Morley reserve found new ways to speak to each other last weekend, and new ways to listen. Singing the Same Song: Women Celebrating Women was the third annual Women’s Conference to be held in Cochrane. Organizers of the conference designed it to build bridges between the two cultures, and.even they were surprised at the overwhelmingly positive response from participants. The room at the Western Heritage Museum was full to overflowing with more than 250 women, who spent the day thinking about their place in their own bodies, in their families, and in the world.

Mrs. Georgie Mark, an elder from the Morley reserve, gave the opening prayer and blessings at lunch and at the ending of the conference. Ann Mortifee’s keynote speech (keynote because it was full of notes and in the key of G) began the conference on Saturday morning. Mortifee sang, accompanied by her own drumming, at intervals through her talk. By the end of her hour-long opening she had the entire audience standing in a huge circle around the edges of the room, singing with her “Spiraling down to the centre, the centre of the earth…”

Her thesis was straightforward: “In the first part of our life we build up all the differences and sorrows and misery we can possibly get hold of. In the second part we try to get rid of them, heal them, and release them.”

Mortifee told the crowd she was brought up on a sugar cane farm in Zulu land, under South Africa’s apartheid policy. “I remember one day standing outside my white house on the hill,” she said, “Wondering why I was born into the white house, why not in the mud huts – why I was white and not black? I knew these were important questions, and that if I could find an answer I wouldn’t be so anxious.”

“There’s a reason we were born into different bodies, different races,” Mortifee told the group. “The Great Spirit does not do things for nothing. It’s our job to find out why this body, why this time,why this personality? To find out why Creator made us.”

She compared the pain of living to the grit inside an oyster. “What creates the pearl is dissatisfaction, discomfort. The oyster coats the grit to make it less painful to carry. The pearl is our wisdom, which we gain by living with pain.” The word Shaman, Mortifee said, means the Wounded Healer. She found great comfort in that translation. “I’d spent my life trying to heal, but to be yourself is to be wounded. Instead of saying ‘I’m wounded, I’m a victim’, say ‘Thank God that I am wounded!”
…..

Healing Journey

HEALING JOURNEY
By JACQUI UNDERWOOD
(Originally published in West Vancouver Lifestyles Magazine, March 1996)

Onyx eyes flashing gypsy fire, hair like eagle down, a tender open smile strengthened by primeval instinct; Ann Mortifee is a million contradictions rolled into one passion. Her angelic soulful voice transcends the ages. Her journey has taken her from overnight star in Vancouver at the age of 17 to the New York stage, London, Paris, through the civil war in Lebanon, the back streets of Calcutta and home again. Both adored and criticised for her choices, Ann never wandered very far from who she really is. At the invitation of Ann’s publicist, I agree to take part in one of her healing workshops at a holistic retreat on Cortez island. As the Coval Air seaplane taxis out of Vancouver harbour, I wonder what awaits me. The city grows distant as the islands of the Northern Gulf come into faded view. The subject of ‘Compassion and Healing Through Sound’ is a bit over whelming and I am hoping the workshop will be intimate, in concert with the peaceful environment of Hollyhock Farm.

Ever present is the best way to describe Ann Mortifee. As a child absorbed in the moment she radiates a loving, beckoning energy. Our rapport is natural. A quick overview of her life sets the stage for the three days ahead. Ann’s workshops are a mini version of experiencing your own life, through singing, the way she has.

“We all have a destiny, we just have to find it.” Ann’s began in South Africa, as a child of an upper middle class family in the big white house on the hill. Born into privilege, she wondered why others lived in shanty towns. She wrote poetry at an early age but she didn’t start setting words to music until after her discovery in 1967 in Vancouver.

As a teenager, she picked up a guitar, taught herself music, and sang other people’s songs. Her family never thought of her as having any musical ability. It was a friend who recognized her gifted voice. Reluctantly she accepted the suggestion to audition at the Vancouver Playhouse. It was for the lead in ‘Ecstasy of Rita Joe’. The producers needed someone not only to sing, but improvise guitar and voice. The rest, as they say, is history.

She played Ottawa and New York as the toast of the town, but she didn’t feel comfortable until her next challenge. She was asked to write a whole new score for the Royal Winnipeg Ballets version of ‘Ecstasy’ She then discovered “the power of music to transform an audience.” Ann recalls her first experience working with the Royal’s choreographer. “Out of the feeling, music would come…he would dance pain… and I would empathize with music… I never aspired to be a writer, it happened by default.”

By the 1970′s she had cut her first album, was hosting a TV series out of Ottawa and playing with the stars of the day including Bruce Cockburn and Seals & Croft. Her next big stage performance, Jacques Brel, put her in New York again. This time being wooed by a London producer. Her second album, Baptism, produced at Abbey Road Studios, included original songs. She signed a major contract which involved three years of touring. Then, just as her international career took off, Ann threw it all away.

She was looking for something deeper. “I couldn’t imagine singing was what I was meant to do.” Perhaps her roots in South Africa or later days mountain trekking with Chief Dan George revealed a bigger picture. She saw the potential of global transformation through spiritual pursuit. She quit music, earning a reputation as a volatile talent. To the chagrin of her producers she chose to take a three year pilgrimage.

Her journey of self-discovery took her to the ashrams of India, to Calcutta to work with Mother Theresa, and to Lebanon trying to understand civil war. Finally she found Paris, painting, writing and still searching. She returned to Canada to the surprise that she was more popular than ever. It was another turning point. She did her second one woman show and cut a third album.
“Journey to Kairos was some of the best work I’ve ever done….all of my passion, all of my feelings about Lebanon and India went into that album and my voice had taken on another octave, with a deeper, darker sound to it.”

Ann became more confident. She started her own record company. Then it happened again. The lure of a major label put her under a commercial producer’s control. On the road again as a working artist, she cut more albums and wrote scores for film and ballet. She bought a home in West Vancouver, met a partner, had a son. Still, something was missing. She was living outside of her vision.
In 1988, I was at the refrigerator looking for orange juice, my son was crying and I broke down. Here I was; my relationship ended, my career headed down the wrong path. The last album, “Bright Encounter”, was out of sync with my destiny. I was experiencing the pain of doing work I didn’t believe in….something most people live with.”

For the second time in her life, the singer let the curtain fall. She cancelled her record contract and stopped touring. “I had lost my way. I didn’t trust myself. I swore I would never write again until someone actually came to my door and told me what to write about.” Two years later, someone did.

Before her fateful meeting with California psychologist David Feinstein, Hollyhock Farm had finally convinced Ann to lead a singing workshop at the retreat on Cortez Island. Hollyhock had been calling for some time, but she had refused for lack of formal training in music or teaching. “Our interest is in your spontaneity and passion”, they had said. Once again she jumped into the unknown.
“At first I panicked. Buying books on how to sing, teach, and organize…. then I realized all I had to do was go inside, see my process and share it.” She amalgamated her knowledge of yoga and meditation. The end result is transformational. When you express your innermost feelings, healing is the by-product…if you allow it.

The workshops filled Ann’s void in the late eighties. She was in touch with her self again. She thought she had finally found her path. Life would soon present another surprise.

Enter: Dr. David Feinstein, author of Personal Mythology and co-author of Rituals for Living and Dying. Her music on the ‘Born to Live’ album caught Feinstein’s attention. He had been using it in his work. “I think you were meant to write music for people who are dying,” he told her by phone from California. He flew up to her West Vancouver home and held her hand until she did Serenade at the Doorway. The album, unmarketed, took off on its own and found its way into hospices, cancer and AIDS clinics and palliative care homes. Within a year of the album’s release, the singer was doing workshops with the dying in nine different countries. She was in demand as a keynote speaker. She won the Order of Canada in 1992.

“To work with the dying was not a logical choice for me, but once I started, I realized what I needed to know about my own mortality. I was living as though I had endless time, so I upped the ante. Dying people are authentic, they have no time to waste. I began to live my life to the fullest..as if I only had one day left.”

During my three days with Ann at Hollyhock, I felt the whole group of 14 transform. We began disjointed, self conscious, tentative. By the end we were whole, one person, loving and singing our hearts out.

“Healing is not about whether the patient lives or dies,” says Ann, “it’s about coming to a place of peace with who you are.”
These days Ann is working on a new musical that is the culmination of her own journey. It is a work in progress in the truest sense. It is the reworking of When the Rains Come, a love story set in South Africa, presented as a workshop last year at the Arts Club. She expects to complete it by the time this article is published. It is her most daring work yet.

In the first rendition of Rains she chose the old paradigm that life should be sacrificed for the good of the whole, as in war. “That is the masculine principle,” she says, “but now the desire for power no longer serves us, the only way we can survive on this planet is through elevated consciousness.” It is Ann’s personal message and the most ardent display of her own desire to be of service.
From a recent collection album:
“This is a healing journey
We walk it one by one
Each woman and each man alone
To the sound of a different drum. “