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About Shireen
Shireen Amini is a queer, Puerto Rican-Iranian-American, Earth-loving musician based in Portland, Oregon. She blends rock, latin, hip hop, and roots music with socially-conscious themes and soulful stories of change.
To contextualize her artistry, it is important to Shireen to acknowledge her relation to this land, its peoples, its history, and how her identities have shaped her. She is committed to being an agent for change.
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As community singing is re-surging as a technology of reclamation, belonging, and mobilization toward a soul-based, liberation-oriented future, it is abundantly clear that aware, skillful, and vibrant facilitation of song is more and more needed. Shireen Amini (non-binary using she/her) unintentionally found her way into this particular work through the tributaries of singer-songwriter performance, drum circle facilitation, circle singing, and sound healing. Now with 4+ years specifically leading community singing, she holds this role as "songleader" with such honor and joy, constantly learning from and inspired by her elders and colleagues in this calling.
If you are feeling the call and notice there are some "how to" pieces that need support, nourishment, inspiration, or you've never led song but are excited and curious, this workshop may be the perfect meeting point for you. The first half of this event, Shireen will invite a collaboratively-informed learning process to feed your songleading practice...topics and exercises covered may include:
• how to set a strong cultural container
• musical skills and knowledge that help
• song, music, lineage acknowledgement and storytelling
• tending well to traumas in relationship to music
• how to teach a song, how to "ride" a song
• techniques and strategies for orchestrating parts
• holding the energetics of more-than-just-singing possibilities i.e. ritual, grief space, play, dance party
• requests from you!
After we have nourished this craft with substantial behind-the-scenes exploration, the second half of our event will be an experience of Shireen leading the community in her own brand of song circle. She'll weaves stories behind the songs that have come through her as medicine, those arising out of pain, reclaiming of power, and irrepressible feelings of joy, into the skillful teaching and spirited singing of them in community. Having received these songs in collaboration with nature and spirit, she knows that if their medicine has brought her such strength and healing, they can for others as well. And so it has been. Songs like “I Am Free in my Body,” “Gather Your Resilience” and “The Sun Song” have rippled out, meaningfully, far and wide.
In a field of firmness and care for the nuanced realities we walk in with, including complex relationships to singing and various forms of lived marginalization, Shireen will set the space to increase the potential for safety and bravery. Powered by groove and soul, voices, percussion, and guitar, our community will become a live organism, present to emergence, the co-created magic and movement of the moment, available to whatever way the medicine shows up for us, here and now. All prostrations are welcome: sitting, standing, walking, shaking, dancing, laying flat, as the body has full permission to do what it intelligently knows to do to hold intention and release. Sing for your curiosity, your broken heart, your anger, and your belly laughter.
Shireen's hope is you come away more empowered to lead song where it is needed and feeling just a little more free.
For those interested in connecting with song as a way to support healing and visions for change in our world, enjoy this a combination of performance with storytelling (often with a singalong component) and original medicine songs taught / sung in community, often with the invitation to stand up, move, or go inward and feel feelings. There will be a percussion basket open for folks to reach to at anytime and participate percussively. We will create a soft container of ceremony and go through an arc of an experience, with a song sequence that takes us on a journey and lands us in a new place.
The valley’s best farms and orchards bring their bounty to Hood River Harvest Fest with stands full of produce, giant displays of apples, pears, squash, raw honey, beautiful flowers, local plants, herbs, and more. Stock up for the season with basketfuls this autumn’s harvest.
The artists and makers you will find at Hood River Harvest Fest go through a juried acceptance process and are some of the best in the region. All items sold by vendors are handcrafted and locally made. Hats, candles, cheese, jams, woodworking, paintings, clothing, jewelry, and more. The “marketplace” is not to be missed.
All ages! Kids under 12 are free but still need a "free" ticket for entry through the ticketing platform
