tension

In the previous article I presented an exercise for reconnecting with the natural, tension-free voice.  Of course the voice and the body can not be separated from each other – tension in the body will always cause tension in the voice.  So freeing the voice is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic unless you also free the body.

Imagine you've got a painful muscle spasm in your right shoulder.  Can you feel how that would affect your voice, for singing or speaking?  How about a crick in your neck?  Perhaps you've been there - you just can't sing or speak with a free and resonant tone if your body is full of tension.

[caption id="attachment_558" align="alignright" width="201" caption="Even if you don't have to do this..."][/caption]

But even if you're a mime (perhaps especially if you're a mime!) tension in your body will have a negative impact on your performance, because you just can't be expressive if your body is not relaxed and supple.  If you're one of those people who just can't be expressive, check yourself - I bet you're literally "up tight."  You would have a lot to gain by loosening up a bit!

I mean, imagine you're an actor playing a "hero" or something, and you walk on stage trying to hide a backache, or a twinge in your sciatic nerve.  There's no way you can be convincing.  And no matter what you're trying to play, discomfort in the body will take up precious mind share, distracting you from your internal story and your lines.

So let's fix it, shall we?  I believe the solution has two parts: long-term and short-term.

Long Term Fitness for Performers

I'm not going to harp on this, because this series of articles is really about what to do in the last 30 minutes before you hit the stage, but in the long term you simply need to stay healthy.  If you were a carpenter, you would keep your saw blades sharp.  As a performer, your tool kit is your body, and you need to keep it in good shape - strong, flexible and supple.  And this means (and I apologize here to the dedicated couch potatoes) physical exercise.

As it happens I've been doing p90x lately (turn your sound off if you click on that link).  It's got all the major exercise types in it, including various cardio and strength modules, and I've realized that if I only got to do one thing to keep myself in good performance shape, it would be yoga.  Yoga is not for sissies, at least not the yoga I'm doing.  It's the most demanding module in the whole course!  And it works on all the most important stuff for performers: breathing, strength and (obviously) flexibility.

If you can't do Yoga or you don't want to for some reason, substitute the activities of your choice as long as they leave you in the right physical shape.  I bet swimming is a good choice, coupled with a stretching routine.

Ditching tension in the last 30 minutes

Living life, for most people, is a bit stressful.  Very few stage performers spend their days getting massages and sipping cool water on an idyllic tropical beach.  There are bills to pay.  There are disagreements with your loved ones.  There is trouble in your day job.  If you live in a city, even getting to the venue will probably involve a bit of road rage, so preparation for stage is all about shedding the tension that has accumulated in your body over the past while, so that you're as relaxed and ready as you can be when you hit the boards.  (And the healthier you are in general, the easier it will be to get rid of the tension of the day - see above.)

I like to start with general relaxation.  Lie down on your back if you can.  Perhaps on a couch in the green room, or on a carpeted floor.  Kick obnoxious people out of the space if possible.  Close your eyes and breathe deeply a few times, noticing the tension drain from your major muscles.  Tense and relax all your muscles as you breathe, starting with your toes and feet, and working your way up through the whole body all the way up to your neck, your face, and even your scalp.  This is a pretty standard relaxation routine, and it's pretty quick - about 5 minutes.

Next stretch out your spine a bit.  Stand up, take a deep breath and exhale as you do a slow "swan dive," bending until you are hanging your head down, your hands hanging loose down by your feet (or even on the floor if you're flexible).  Breathe deeply a few times.  Feel your spine lengthen.  Now bend your knees and start to roll up slowly like a rag doll, letting each vertebra in your back straighten up separately, from your sacrum right up to your neck.  Stand tall.  You should feel very aligned.

By now you will be aware of any pockets of tension that remain.  Stretch them out.  Typical places that might need extra work are the hips, the belly, the shoulders and the neck.  This is not meant to be a book on stretching, so if you want some specific stretches to use, go ahead and ask me and I'll find you some.

Cheating

Sometimes you won't have an hour or even 15 minutes before you go on stage.  But you will still want to get as relaxed as you can in the few minutes that you have.  Besides just staying fit and eliminating stress from your life (wouldn't that be nice?), I believe there's potential for accelerating the process of getting into your ideal performance state by using "anchors."  A good example of an anchor is the sound of a bell, if you're one of Pavlov's dogs - with our without food, it put them into a physical and mental state called "I want to eat now!"  Of course that was a conditioned response, and Pavlov did it be associating the sound of the bell with food.

You can do the same thing for yourself - get into your ideal performance state the "long way", and then introduce your "bell" whatever it will be.  We're delving into NLP here, and this post is already too long, so I'll make this the subject of a future article.

So we've dealt with the voice and the body.  Next in the series - getting into the right state of mind.

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.