Woman Of Impact: Listen to Jess Brennan's interview about Brazen Cabaret

You’re invited not to be perfect – but to be Brazen.

Listen to the interview HERE:

D: So today we're here with Jess Brennan Hi.

J: Hi.

D: Thank you so much. Thank you for your time time for being so open heart and talking to me today to explain and share a little bit more about your event.

D So, is the Brazen Cabaret, what a very interesting name.

J: Yeah, it means bold and without shame. Bold without shame. Bold and without shame. And so it really epitomizes what I wish for women, what I wish for the people who are serving through the cabaret and for the people who are performing. Many for the first time in their lives, stepping onto a stage, doing something totally new, something they never thought they could do. And that for me was, I shared that entry point through singing and keep discovering that when I can do things I didn't think I could do, expands my life in these really rich, productive, love-oriented ways. And so to the extent that we can surprise ourselves by being wrong about our limitations, I think it's so enlivening and the the potential to create that space for other people through the Brazen Cabaret is so fulfilling.

D: Wow. Where did you have the inspiration? Where did it come from?

J: It was a culmination of three things this summer, so it all came together very quickly. The first was that I brought my husband to a retreat with Claude Stein, who is my vocal coach going back 15 years, who works up in Woodstock and is the founder of a workshop called the Natural Singer Workshop that goes through Kripalu and Omega and Brighton Bush and the Open Center. He's worked with like 35,000 people, many of whom are beginners learning to find their true voices and to embrace a different kind of strength and healing through voice. At the same time, we had started trauma work with my husband and I together to start to get at the impact of domestic violence and intimate partner violence within our own family and the legacies and the ways that breaking the chain of abuse was happening with much effort, but in this really profound way in our own life. And then three, in my massage practice here at Held for the last seven or eight years, I just have so many women who come and they'll be like, oh, my throat chakra is so blocked. Like I just can't, I'm not speaking my truth. I can't find my voice. I need to find my true voice. When I was up there with Claude and my husband doing this work that enables people to find their true voices, I was like, oh my gosh, this is happening in Woodstock, it's happening at retreat centers, it needs to happen in Montclair, it needs to happen in my town. To the extent that that innovation can support the people in our town doing really important, really critical and needed intimate partner violence work, prevention and healing. It's a win for everybody. It's hard to... people say, what are you doing? And I need three minutes to fully explain. I don't have a 30-second elevator pitch that makes sense. Throw that out the window. Right, right? But I'm really proud of what's coming out of it for everybody. There's no loser here. And what's especially exciting is that we're bringing in local artisans, local vendors. The raffle prizes are donated by local businesses. We've got Rosa Spina, the florist, creating tiny little bouquets for all of our cast members as a surprise to be purchased by family and friends. Like, it's a real coming together of the Montclair, Bloomfield, Passaic County, Essex County communities that everybody wins. Essex County communities that everybody wins. Amazing.

D: Wow, that sounds amazing. And not only amazing, it's the beauty of the innovation, the technique that you are sharing to find the voice. The technique is your own voice. You are the own instrument. It's not something from outside. that he's going to instruct. So the person that is receiving the guidance, she's going to find, or he's going to find, his own voice.

J: Yeah, mostly she's. No surprise, right? In this healing work. Yeah, and you know it is, it's so funny that you make that distinction already between instrument and technique, because that's one of the principles that, in the way that we're learning to sing, it's not about perfection. And it is about technique, and it's about the instrument, but it's more about the intention. And so Claude distinguishes between the instrument, which is the vocal chords and the anatomy that we're born with, and we all have it. And then there's the style and the technique and the mechanics of sound, which in his view are entirely determined by what you want. And so if the sound of your voice is determined by what you want, it follows that if you if your authentic intention is to soothe somebody with a lullaby, your voice, your dynamics, your phrasing, even just in our speech, right? I'm talking to you as a friend and so my voice is a particular way. If I'm hailing a taxi, my voice is going to change dramatically because I want something different. And so we're learning to sing first by tapping into what it is that we want. And in this way, it has a lot to do with acting training. And so embodying what that person may have wanted when they wrote that song and what your intention is in singing it, rather than trying to emulate what another singer did. What, I can't think of any singers right now. Oh my gosh, like right off the top of my head.

D: Fred Mercury.

J: What Freddie Mercury did. I just watched that movie this weekend, that's so funny. Yeah, I don't want to emulate Freddie Mercury. I don't want to emulate Janis Joplin. I'm not trying to emulate Adele. And we make that mistake. We judge ourselves against these versions of songs that we've loved that these other people have interpreted in their own specific ways. And then we make the mistake of judging our instrument, often prematurely. And in our culture, we have this idea that if we're not going to be a singer, we have no business singing. And so when I invite people to brazen, sometimes they even get a little combative, like, absolutely not. Don't ask me to do that. Like, I would be like, I will never be sitting on a stage that would cause violence upon other people, right? And we don't we don't Pretend that only Olympic runners can go jogging And we don't require people to be professional golfers in order to go out and enjoy 18 holes But we do expect if people are going to sing, especially in front of other people, that they have some level of quote-unquote professionalism. And when we compare ourselves against that, what comes up are these decades of shame for many of us around what we've said and what we didn't say and how we sound and how we think we're going to be judged for how we sound and our inability to do it quote-unquote perfectly. And so we stay silenced and stuck. And the heart-body-mind way of singing, which Claude embodies in The Natural Singer, the approach that we're using, is so much more holistic and food for healing, rather than punishing ourselves for being not Adele.

D: Not being so perfect. Yeah. And the beauty of having the strength and the courage is just to step on the stage and say, I am stepping on this stage because I also want to be seen.

J: I'm willing to be seen. Gosh, that's courageous. Right? I'm willing to be seen. I'm willing for you to judge me. I'm willing to make a mistake in front of you because I'm committed to something bigger than that. And it's easy in this case to know who we're standing up for because everybody knows somebody in an abusive or violent relationship, every one of us. The statistics in New Jersey are terrible. One in three of us, one in five pregnant women are abused during their pregnancies, which as a doula is particularly abhorrent. We all know somebody, and many of the cast are domestic violence survivors themselves. And so this takes on a really poignant... This becomes a really poignant opportunity to strengthen our voices and sing from our hearts and reclaim some part of ourselves and sing a new song. You know, with a new voice that's about clarity and power and boundaries and a different future where we can do things we didn't think we could.

D: Yeah, and that goes into, I guess, to another level. Now, I've been seeing somebody else's weakness. It's being a witness of my own voice, and now I can hear myself. now also be an inspiration for other people in the same situation to say, hey, you can also find your voice. And I believe that's how we create a movement.

J: Yeah, absolutely. And it is a sacred space to watch somebody do that. It's so moving. And when I go to singing workshops, they're all day long. It just feels like birth after birth after birth, these tears streaming down my face because watching somebody do that is, I don't, is such a gift, you know? And the challenge then, assuming that everybody's taking their turn, right, is sort of like stepping into this space in front of each other, and we're holding space for one another, is believing the good feedback that you receive, is believing the compliments.

D: And you're being cheered on, like someone is cheering up for you.

J: Literally, like it's almost as if you've been there, hun. Like, there's so much clapping and applause for every single person, and you'd be amazed how many women duck their heads and walk right off the stage. And Claude, to his credit, stops that, and he says, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, you go walk back up there and receive their applause, because to reject it doesn't help anybody. So stand there, even though it's uncomfortable, to receive the love and the positive feedback. And boy, when we've been conditioned to accept being wrong and quote-unquote tone deaf for all of our lives, to hear the good things requires so much surrender and faith and just like breathing through it, you know, almost more than if we were getting criticism. Like it's harder to accept the praise for our beautiful voices than it is to be criticized for our mistakes. How fucked up is that?

D: Yeah, so learning that there's always room to improve and to grow and to learn and even though we are going through the pain, we can change and we can learn how to tune in into a better frequency because that's about frequency and when you are in a position of being dismissed or being hurt someone is like you were in a violence mode to change that frequency you need to elevate and then when your voice is suffocated you need to find a new tune and change that new you know change into a new frequency so you don't have to be a professional to be part of this.

J: Oh, no, absolutely not. In fact, it's encouraged. I mean, pros can always learn. And I think that this gets to the heart of what you're saying is a frequency is a band. It's like, it's a spectrum. It's like, it's like an ombre, right? I always say that word wrong. It's like gradients, right? It's not a white. And so in our love lives, we aren't perfect and atrocious, and we're not right and wrong. And as singers, we're not like good and bad. And even a performance isn't like a success or a failure, right? It's always an incremental like, oh, this was a little bit better this time. This is where I struggled. This is imperfect, but this is, you know, like we're progressing. But we have these dichotomous binaries that we just like live by and smash ourselves into. And so whether that's like I'm in a healthy relationship or an unhealthy relationship. Well I think all of us at any given time are in some gray zone. And we're moving back and forth, we're oscillating just the way that our voices do. So there's like there's a C right there's middle C and then there's C-sharp. And then there's you know like notes. And one of my favorite vocal exercises is sort of like this idea of a spectrum incarnate, where you like sing a note, like, note, and then you sing the next note up, like, note, and then you slide, note, and you have to pause at each incremental step up, slower and slower and slower. And I think if we gave ourselves that grace and that progress of our own growth and our own humanity, we'd all be so much happier with where we are exactly right now. And willing to shift it when we realize or someone sees and mirrors back for us that our hearts are being broken again and again. We deserve better and love. We deserve to be held by the hands that love us and not harmed. All that's to say that I think that we have these black and white ideas that just don't fit a human experience, whether that's in relationship or in art or in community. And to the extent that we can sing a swan song, so to speak, like sing the end of our ideal self and like this black and white thinking and hold space for ourselves when we're doing something scary and new. And like, okay, like, okay, I'm learning. Okay, I'm growing. Okay, I'm doing better than before. Or today. Today I fucked it up. Okay. All right. Okay. And then you there's a new note. There's a new, like it's different than today, it's different than yesterday, it's different than an hour ago. And that for me is like, oh, I wish we could all, I said I wish we could give ourselves the grace of that, but I see it at birth, all around the perinatal period, when people are grieving, when people are passing, when we're grieving, when we've lost a loved one or a stage of life that we identified with.

D: In my case, I'm working closer now with fertility. And the struggle with every month receiving her blood. And my suggestion is celebrate your blood. And when I receive a message saying, I can't even look at my menstruation, my period right now, because that's not what I wanted to see. So that's also like finding the frequency where you're tuning in. It's not to dismiss that feeling. It's not like, oh, just wash it off and that's it. There's a new month, but it's like sitting with it and singing that sad note. that breathe that you're explaining, like extending that note with a new air, right? Because you have to control your air taking to go into the next note. And that's the challenge for, in that case, like the fertility, the beginning, where the way you conceive your baby gives the tone to how the pregnancy is going to unfold, the baby, the birth is going to unfold. It's right at the beginning. Because if you are conceiving from a place of a wounded place or that inner child wants to sing a different song from her childhood that wasn't played, a nice song, and now I wanted to be a mom. We need to find a new tune and conceive that child from a loving song.

J: It does and like having that breath it sort of reminds me of like to get a good tone and singing you need diaphragmatic support so you need to like hold your core not tightly not clenched, but you need to support it. And the ability to see that blood not as failure, not as indication of a personal failure, but as a painful, heartbreaking, disappointing, grief-stricken moment, but not a failure. And that's the in-between note, right? Those are the overtones of like, okay, this is painful and heartbreaking, but it doesn't mean I failed. It doesn't mean I'm not a mother. It doesn't mean I won't be a mother. And if it is not in the universe for me to be a mother of a human child, then what? And am I willing to dive into what the universe is asking of me and find my way to survive amid circumstances that maybe I never asked for? And so that's the warrior spirit. Holy cow. Holy moly. And it requires that like breath, that holding of ourselves because it's so easy and so tempting just to go to black and white like, well, that's fucked. Like, oh, well, I'm not pregnant again. Clearly I'm not meant to. Like clearly this doctor sucks. Clearly life is terrible and yeah we dabble in that a little bit yeah for sure for sure let's be human.

D: Yes but it's the willingness, how long we're gonna stay in that note yeah like using the analogy of the intention of the event and bringing like bringing romance to this stage

J: Yeah to hold it tenderly yeah and like let it evolve. Let it sing its own song.

D: Because I often times I hear like, do not romanticize motherhood, do not romanticize so and so. When you are dealing with violence, domestic violence, everything is already so heavy. Everything is already in the spectrum of black and white. There's like, you don't see hope sometimes. It's very hard to see hope. I do believe, I'm not sure exactly what characterized the violence in this project, but I'm just sharing here the domestic silence voices when is like financial abuse or psychological abuse, those are also type of violences. And it's not because it's like a black and blue in your face, but it's also hurt your soul.

J: Absolutely. And to add to that is sexual coercion and economic control, verbal assault, isolation. There's a diagram called the Power and Control Wheel that I think is among the best practices in the IPV world, intimate partner violence world, that captures the many facets of the ways that people try to control their loved ones. I'm so glad that you said that.

D: Yes, yes. During that time that you think there is no hope, there is no one is looking at you and if you can play a song to elevate your frequency and to see hope that if you are driving your baby to daycare or if you are able to tune in with the frequency, with songs that brings that hope back, I think that's something beautiful. It's medicine, inciting your voice. It's going to come after the aftermath and being surrounded by the community. And what you're doing Jess is so powerful. And I'm so glad that I'm here with you today and learning more about your mission that birthed so quickly over the summer. So how can people like do you still have any availability like can people still sign up for the presentations for the J: Oh absolutely yeah, there are a lot of ways to be involved. Our website is brazencabaret.com. So brazen is B-R-A-Z-E-N cabaret dot com. There's two shows. They're local in Montclair on Church Street at the Unitarian Universalist Church. One's at 2 p.m. It's open to everybody and it's going to be group singing, group lessons, harmonies, counterpoint games, call and response, it's just plain fun for everybody, for families. We are also going to have a 7 p.m. cabaret, doors at 630, and so those are the performances. There will also be interactive pieces too, so some like group warm-ups and just a lot of fun. Even though we're supporting a very painful topic, we're going to have a night of celebrating people who've broken the chain and all the hard work and courage it takes to break the cycles of abuse. In addition, we've got an online raffle if you can't be there in person. We are selling live stream tickets so you can watch it live from anywhere in the world. We'll have a recording of it. What else? Local vendor artists whose work you can support. The last piece is that we hope to do it again next year. And as a lead-in, we're going to have Claude Stein back to begin workshops with a new group of people later this winter.

D: Oh, wow. So you can come and sing and have your own experience and see what songs want to come through you. Oh, beautiful. So when someone goes to the website, they can purchase a ticket for the 2 o'clock or the 7 o'clock, or it's just one ticket for both?

J: One ticket for either or both.

D: Oh, okay.

J: And the tickets are by donation. So if you have $5, you can pay $5. If you have 500, you can pay 500. And every dollar of the ticket sales goes straight to SOFIA. So they're doing the boots on the ground work with families who are at risk or recovering or escaping domestic violence. And SOFIA is a Montclair, it's a? SOFIA is a Montclair, it stands for Start Out Fresh Intervention Advocates. And since 2010, they've been providing emergency housing, essential supplies, workshops and support groups and upstream education to teach people, young people and older people, warning signs of domestic violence and abusive relationships, and also what to do if someone that you care about is in an abusive relationship. So they're addressing it for 360 degrees and they're deeply connected to Montclair. They were founded in fact shortly before 2010 when a local mom was at the Guyer Street Y with her two children and her estranged ex-husband came in and killed by the pool in front of her 12-year-old daughter. And her mother later went on to found Sophia to try to prevent it from ever happening again. And her name, we should remember it, is Monica Paul. So you can learn more about them at supportsophia.org.

D: Thank you, thank you for sharing that. It's definitely a cause for anyone that is interested to learn more and supporting. That would be amazing. Absolutely. So do you have spots for sponsors as well? Like are you accepting?

J: Absolutely, because every ticket dollar is going to Sophia. All the production costs are by sponsors or out of volunteer pockets. And so we have a sponsorship page and are still accepting donations for the raffle of in-kind products and gift certificates to local businesses and we'll continue to accept them all the way up until showtime. And if we have some that come in a little bit late then we're going to keep the online raffle open so we can just keep the fun going. Keep the abundance flowing for a good cause.

D: All right, do you have any last words for whoever is listening to you right now? Just to sing in the car. Just try singing in the car and one of my favorite tips from Claude, one of our favorite techniques is if you start to get in your head or you start to sing off or you think you're singing off, sing louder. Just get louder. If you think you're wrong, just go louder and louder and louder. And do your best to distract your brain.

D: That's a great tip. Thank you so much. I'm surely gonna sing on my way home. Here's to all of us singing loudly and not quite off pitch, but somewhere close to it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Jess.

J: How much fun this has been. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Jess has been a birth doula, childbirth educator, and midwives’ assistant for more than 15 years, comforting, supporting and holding those in pain. She became an end-of-life doula after a death in the family showed her how much birth and death have in common.

During periods of deep personal loss, Jess wished for the kind of service doulas provide, to support grief's intensely-physical and “in the body” nature. She also experienced how “companioning” grief support helped more than prescriptive (do-this, not-that), platitudes or cheerleading (“it’ll all be ok!”). Since grief doulas didn't exist, Jess later founded Held to meet that need.

Jess lives with her family in Montclair, New Jersey.

Get your Tickets here: https://www.brazencabaret.com