Preparing for stage - free the voice

You’ve got a great piece to perform.  You’ve made a great plan.  You have rehearsed it to a professional standard.  Then you get on stage, and it just doesn’t come off because your voice wasn’t in good shape, or your body was full of tension, or you were in the wrong state of mind.  What a waste!  And the tragedy is that it would have been easy to prevent.  You need a reliable routine to get your voice, your body and your mind into the right space for a peak performance.  That's what we're going to learn in this mini-series on how to prepare for the stage.

Let's start with the voice.  A clear and responsive voice is critical not only to singers, but to actors and speakers as well.  The human perceptions are very adept at detecting "issues" in other people by the way that they sound.  The sound of your voice is a "deep measure" of your health, and it's easy to prove this to yourself.  Just a few seconds of listening to someone vocalize and you can tell whether they are sick, how much energy they have, and even a lot about their mood, psychology and physiology.  That may be why we developed the capacity to sing, as a species - singing lets us demonstrate our fitness to a lot of potential mates all at once.  (I'm thinking here of prehistoric rituals, not groupies... uh, let's move on.)

Cutting to the chase, a clear and responsive voice is a voice that is free of tension.  Tension in your voice degrades everything about it - your range, your quality, your vocal agility, your dynamic range, everthing.  So finding a tension-free way of using your voice is critical to your success as a performer.

If you notice that your breaths are noisy or forced, those breaths are introducing tension into your voice.  A silent, effortless breath will have the opposite effect, relaxing the voice and resetting it for another phrase of speech or music.  Often times as performers we try to make the breath as short as possible, fearing that it is interrupting the music or the speech.  That fear, together with the fear of not having enough breath for the next phrase, leads us to force the inhalation, and as a result we accumulate more and more tension in the voice as the performance goes on.  Quality degrades, and stamina becomes an issue.  Also this infuses the performance with a sense of panic (which probably isn’t appropriate for every scene.)  Don’t fear the breath – think of each one as a part of the phrase, not an interruption.  Take the necessary time to breathe well.

Now here’s the exercise that I learned from my multi-talented sister Donya, which is very simple and quick.  I am told that it comes from the popular Linklater method of vocal instruction.  I’ll confirm this for you when I read the Linklater book, “freeing the natural voice.”

Exercise to reconnect with your natural voice

In order to reconnect with your natural voice, you can follow these steps in your backstage routine:

1. Lie on the floor and make yourself relaxed and comfortable
2. Exhale completely, and then simply wait for your body to inhale, which it must do.  Do not inhale on purpose, but allow it to happen.  Do this three times to become comfortable with the ease of it.  All of your inhalations in this exercise should be as effortless as this.
3. Take a deep and effortless breath, and exhale without effort, but catch the breath at the lips with a light “ffff” sound.  Notice the effect of this secondary resistance.  Repeat three times.
4. Take a deep and effortless breath, and exhale this time through a “vvvv” sound.  Notice how the vibrations resonate in the spaces of your head, mouth, throat and chest.  Repeat three times.
5. Continuing the “vvvv” exercise, open up the “vvvv” into an “ah” vowel, and notice how the freedom of this tone gives it clarity.

You can use this exercise to “reset” and reconnect with your natural voice at any time.  Many singers perform this exercise at the beginning of every vocal session, to make sure that they are also rehearsing with their most tension-free instrument.

In the next article we’ll deal with freeing and relaxing the body.