Dida Guigan

Dida Guigan is a graduate of the Swiss Jazz School in Bern, Switzerland. She continued her learning in Lebanon and Egypt with the support of the Swiss promoter Pro Helvetia, and over the course of four years immersed herself in many different singing techniques, languages and musical systems. For the last seven years she has accompanied and assisted choirs and individuals with personalized designed programs and workshops in Switzerland, Beirut (Collectif Kahraba, 3a 7abl el Hawa and the music hub) and the Emirates (Emirates Foundation Youth Mentoring Platform). As a singer, Dida’s approach to the voice is intimate.

Through her own identity path, she has developed a unique technique based on listening to one’s inner voice as a foundation for expressing the melodic and spoken voice in a coherent and personal context. As both a soloist and band performer, she regularly tours in Europe and the Arab world with her different projects; in 2016, “Free” was selected for performance at Chouftouhonna, the feminist art festival of Tunisia.

As a composer, Dida’s personal and authentic work also carries over into the field of theater, having worked with French Canadian sound and theater director Christelle Franca in Montreal. Dida’s vocal technique, writing and coaching skills are, as she says, the inevitable consequence of what her life brought her to explore: freeing one’s self from the rigid life constraints that are all too often imposed upon one. Her own story as an illegal international adoptee, and the ten-year search for her biological family, compelled Dida to create the NGO “Born in Lebanon”, designed to give a voice to, and free from the inside, the illegal international adoptees lost in an ongoing global conflict. She is regularly invited as a guest speaker on the subject of identity in different forms and contexts – artistic, physical and political. More information here: www.didaguigan.com