ANDREA KUZMICH
Body Percussion
As an award winning singer, an ethnomusicologist, composer, arranger and music facilitator, Andrea has performed in and/or recorded with numerous artists, ensembles and choirs: from Whitney Smith’s Big Steam Band to the conventional SATB Choir of Trinity-St. Paul's United Church; from the contemporary improvised new music provided for the soundtracks of The Witch and the backing vocals for Tanya Tagaq, to the traditional folk musics of Darbazi, ZARI, Ori Shalva & co, or Kalendar.
Andrea has taken a leading role in the practice of traditional Ukrainian and Georgian polyphony in Canada. She is one of North America’s foremost practitioners and scholars of Georgian vocal polyphony, and her singing family, Ori Shalva & co (featuring her Georgian husband and two boys of 14 and 20) represent a unique and well respected extension of the family singing tradition that has kept Georgian polyphony alive.
Andrea also runs an ethnomusicologically inspired studio called MusiCamp, out of which she has hosted singing, dance and body percussion workshops, and summer camps for kids. Since 2019, she has also taught body percussion workshops in the Toronto District School Board and as a facilitator at Ontario Womyn's Drum Camp. As a scholar, she has presented and published many papers on Ukrainian and Georgian polyphony in the context of collective memory, temporal distortions, and the performance of ancestry.