Ever since my creative work went online due to the pandemic, I have been able able to liaise with my colleagues all over the world! I am in a band called STRIDE and over the course of the last year, we have been collaborating with our Mexican colleagues who are a band called Rock DI, on top of communicating with Mexico, one of our guitarists moved to Germany at the start of the pandemic and for a time, we were training a Belgian student so there were days when I spoke English, German, French and Spanish all in the space of two hours without getting mixed up which, believe me, is as tiring as it sounds!
on top of the linguistic “spaghetti junction” that was band practice, if you have read my introductory article you might remember me referencing the fact that a few weeks ago I had to seriously pick up the pace of my Italian lessons due to a choreographing opportunity. Well let’s go back to the beginning on this. I am a dancer and I have a fantastic dance mentor who is a fellow polyglot like myself and in our sessions we speak a so-called Engerliano (English, German and Italian without any actual pattern) and last year he was so kind as to support me to choreograph two warmup routines to German pop songs and I then tested them out on the dance group paragon M3 which we are both a part of. On top of his mentor work and m3, Alex also teaches at m3’s Italian equivalent in Milan, a group called SIIATE and as soon as he knew that I was learning proper Italian (not just Engerliano) he was quick to ask me to choreograph a warmup for SIIATE. Naturally, I was flattered by this request and also extremely excited as working in Milan has been on my dance bucket list for years so I accepted! Unfortunately I was just a few days into my Italian course on Rosetta Stone so it was a week before I could even write my introductory paragraph. However with a skilful combination of learn a bit, write a bit , I managed to accomplish the impossible and write a full double-exercised warmup in a language that was new to me in just three weeks! Even by my standards, I believe that this is an insane amount of talent and I still can’t believe I did it but it just goes to show that even when you think a task is impossible, there is always a way of getting the job done if you just think creatively!
When I was young I used to get singing lessons, I soon observed that the majority of singing technical terms were in Italian such as pronto (fast tempo) which intrigued me a bit. When I got a bit older I learned that it was because opera originated in Italy and the majority of classical singers actually learn Italian as part of their career training! As part of the Italian-Scottish community myself, I felt a sense of pride that my heritage had helped shape the musical world and although I have no real proof of this, I do believe that this is part of the reason why I have stayed in the industry.
in conclusion, my two true passions of languages and the arts often overlap. I don’t know if one has helped shape the other but what I do know that it is a beautiful combination that works so well. I believe that artists should think about learning a foreign language especially Italian or French because a lot of dance terms are derived from the French language and as I have said, music terms often originate from Italian.
thanks to
Alex the guitarist
Alex my mentor
Beth Taylor
Dorotè the Belgian student
Ninian Perry
Otokani àlvarez-garcia and the rest of Rock DI
paragon M3
SIIATE
if you are interested in checking out some of the organisations that I mentioned in this article please check out the links below
Paragon M3 https://www.paragon-music.org/m3
SIIATE https://www.milanoltre.org/archivio/festival-2020/siiate-senza-esclusione-di-corpi-eng-version/
STRIDE https://www.paragon-music.org/stride
e e m mcgrath
The Non Verbal Linguist 
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