I’m Sarah Rockwood
I’m a singer/songwriter, actor, author, director, playwright, music producer, artistic embodiment coach, inexhaustible optimist and unflinchingly forthright human being.
At my core, I am a storyteller. The form simply changes based on the needs of the tale; some become songs, others novels, and some stories can be told with a simple moment of stillness. However, there are clear themes that run through my work: the pain of being misunderstood, the joy of discovery and the deep calm that comes from embracing one’s power.
I bring this energy to my coaching as I help artists to stand at the leading edge of their greatness and build lives that fully represent them.
You can learn more about how we can work together here or if you’ve already read through everything and you’ve decided I’m someone you want on your side, then hit the button below and lets get to work.
The Long Version…
September 2024 will mark my 36th year in this business we call show. I started at nine years old as an actor in a local children’s theatre company. It was run by a man who looked like a roadie for a hair-metal band and who treated us like we were professional adults. Well, professional adults who were slightly, or my case, extremely, terrified of him. It was a weird start, but I never looked back and in 35 years, let me tell you, I have done some stuff. I’ll do my best here to give you a taste of everything.
Acting & Directing
I started acting when I was nine. I saw an all-children company perform, and I knew that was where I needed to be. I spent five years in that company and then another five studying theatre in Canada’s FAME High School equivalent. I then attended Sheridan College’s musical theatre performance program. So basically from ages nine to 21, I was walking the boards on a near daily basis.
Acting in plays and musicals provided a home for the excess of emotion, the bigness of my energy, that felt so out of place in my youth. But it was also challenging to maintain a sense of self separate from my characters, and to divorce critique of my work from my self worth.
It took me decades to develop the practices I now use to bring me back to myself, to anchor my energy in a place that is separate from the emotion required for my art. This anchoring, which I call Emotional Centring, means I can go deeper and release the need to hold back because I know how to return to myself. Your artistic options become innumerable when you trust yourself to always find your way home.
Nine year old Sarah, ready for the stage.
Singer-Songwriter
A few months after graduating college, I was in a head-on collision. I was pretty badly injured, and the doctors said I would never have the strength to perform again - which turned out to be a complete lie because I am stubborn and was determined to prove them wrong - but at the time it was devastating and knew if I was to mentally survive, I would need a creative outlet. So I thought “well, I’ll try songwriting,” and bought the ‘Complete Idiot’s Guide to Songwriting.’ I read three chapters and never looked at the book again.
Songwriting clicked pretty quickly for me. After a few terrible attempts, I started writing really good stuff. Check it out below if you don’t believe me. : ) I credit this quick level of creation to the 15+ years of work I did prior to sitting down to write a song. From the age of nine, I’d been reading and analyzing scripts, taking apart musical theatre pieces in order to learn them, and looking objectively at every piece of entertainment I consumed, all while watching the extremely talented group of people around me do the exact same thing.
This Artistic Cross-training fed my soul and gave me a deep foundation upon which to build my songs. I firmly believe that no exploration is wasted when it comes to being an artist. When you explore something new, you may not know why or how it will influence your art, but I guarantee you it will feed and improve your work.
The rock and roll years.
Author
Three and a half minutes just wasn’t cutting it anymore. I needed more time to tell the tales that were swirling around in my head. So one day I sat down and started writing. Pretty soon I had an actual novel in front of me. It was wild, wonderful and unexpected.
Writing novels is hard. Period. The loneliness of the blank page, the teasing out of entire worlds from the back of your head, the sheer magnitude of the work itself. Editing 100,000 words takes a while. Not to mention the never-ending stream of ideas. It’s constant. When you open up to the flow of story, it can be overwhelming.
I really had to learn to sit with ideas and slowly let them unfold before going all in and starting another piece. I needed to look at them from every angle and determine if they were something that needed to come into the world right now, in this moment, or if they could wait while another idea got my attention. Decision made, I either got started or put everything that was in my brain down on paper and then set it aside for a later date. Artistic Essentialism is by no means easy, but it is rewarding. It takes a sense of discipline to decide what will receive your attention, rather than splatter your energy over a myriad of things. But when you focus your artistic power things get done faster, truly. And then, surprise, surprise… you get to work on more stuff.
My first foray into publishing. Reviews were mixed at best.
Voice and Performance Coach
I spent the last two years of high school (at that time, where I’m from, high school was five years) acting as a teacher’s assistant with the vocal program. There I began repackaging the skills and exercises I knew from acting and teaching them to vocalists to help their overall performance. In my 20s I taught voice lessons in music stores to people ages five and up. And as I worked more and more with recording artists, in addition to coaching their voices, I drew from my experience as a theatrical director and began helping them put together sets and craft their overall shows.
The car accident destroyed my voice. Besides my right ankle being crushed, a mild brain injury and tons of soft tissue damage, I also managed to bruise the valve between my stomach and esophagus. So every time I lay down, my stomach contents danced right back up and burned the crap out of my vocal cords. Everything combined, meant I had to learn to sing again.
It took awhile. My teacher’s studio was in her basement and since I was on crutches, I had to go down the stairs on my butt, and then hoist myself into a chair at the bottom. It was a humbling and extremely emotional process. However, it brought me a level of body awareness and an intimate understanding of the human voice I wouldn’t trade for anything. So when a little boy whose vocal cord was paralyzed by a stroke, or a 20 something woman who wanted to sing death metal, or a man in his early 60s who was a professional Mick Jagger impersonator, walked into my studio, I could intuitively sense where we need to go, and create a safe space for their bodies to go there. Paying attention to the Creative Body and what it needs is paramount for artists. My personal experience with physical and emotional recovery helped me build a vast skill set to help artists establish what they need to do to maintain their ultimate instrument, and to hold space for that journey.
I bring those same principles to the table when working with a recording artist. As we craft their show, I help them play with where they are in the space and how they can use their voice and body to take the audience on a journey. After all, everything is storytelling and the better the story you tell the audience, the bigger fans they will become.
“Sarah’s insight and experience in the physical, spiritual and emotional side of singing is one that I was often scared of and intimidated by, but essentially one that, through patience and persistence helped me breakthrough to gaining more connection and control with pitch and tone and eventually finding my true voice. She has a great sense of humour when confronting challenges, and has a gentle and pragmatic way of working that expresses deep empathy for her students and encourages them and leads them to making discoveries by themselves.”
Brenton Thwaites
Star of Oculus, Maleficent, Pirate’s of the Caribbean & Titans