PARTICIPATING

What is the difference between a group of people at the local movie theater, and a group of people at a local dinner theatre?  Participation.  

In the movie theatre, where it is dark and the eye is dominated by a huge display of flashing lights, I spend two hours in my own head-and when I laugh, scream, cringe or cry, it is in an anonymous space.  No one moving around on screen cares whether I enjoy or dislike the offering.  Their lines are never interrupted by a wash of hilarity from the crowd.  After leaving, I don't recognize anyone beyond the folks I came with, and I never get to let that bigger than life character on the screen know how her performance changed me.  The ideas and feelings created by the imagery have no outlet of exchange.

At a dinner theatre, I am seated at a table, often with strangers.  I have to focus on eating and drinking as well as the lines and action taking place on the stage.  Though the room may be dark, my eye is dominated by three-dimensional objects and breathing people.  You can clap, whistle and laugh hard enough that the action on the stage changes.  Sometimes, you can even break the concentration of those on stage.  During intermission, you can talk about what you have seen with the people at your table.  Always, after the show (and sometimes during the show), there is an opportunity to touch base with the actors.  You can shake hands and share appreciation.   In other words, the ideas and feelings created by the entertainment have an outlet of exchange.  

Exchange of experience and thought is necessary for communication and a defining part of humanity.  Though there are times and places for isolation and introspection, times in busy lives overburdened by responsibilities and opportunities when we need to simply sit and receive, there also need to be times and places for participation.  Trained by televisions and teachers to watch and learn, I think it is imperative for our souls to push ourselves to actively participate when we have the chance.   

Though we seem to be good at participating in sports, we Americans are seriously ignoring opportunities to participate in music, arts and conversation.  We pay lots of money and pay lots of time to watch other people talk, sing, dance, and pray.  We do this by the TV shows we watch, the comments we leave on newspaper websites, the hours spent listening to radio stations which echo our internal biases, and the refusal to make time for relational and communal activities.   

A great singer is a participant in the music.  She has learned in the fire of spotlights that not stepping up to the mic is always worse than stepping up but failing.  She has learned that with every new opportunity, she has gotten better.  She hears people whisper about her talent, but knows her craft is mostly simple persistence.  She hears people yearning toward spirit, energy and joy, acknowledging that they have received those things from her voice, and, because she is a participant, she can respond; she can reach back through the fourth wall and share with them how it is done.   She is not a person who sits and wishes.  The great singer is the one who chooses to take part.  

POSTURE

When I work with a group of singers, one of the first things I note is posture.  I can ask a group to stand, and right away, I know who is ready to sing, and who will need a lot of warm-up time.  I can even discern the kind of warm-up necessary.

There is a kind of casual stance that says,  "I am here, but I am thinking of other things."  That stance has little tension, but very little intention.  This singer needs a difficult technical warm up to distract the brain and focus the body.

There is a slow, encumbered movement to people who are tired and depressed.  Their posture says, "The air is too heavy.  Standing up is hard."  The posture is collapsed and ready to fail.  This singer needs simple exercises that feel good and waken a sleepy system.

Then there are the people who stand quickly and rigidly, with a straight back and lifted shoulders.  Those are the people who are really stressed out, and whose lives are full of responsibilities.  I always look to their knees, because they are the singers who are so firmly planted, they cannot respond to changes.   These are the people that get a back rub and instructions to loosen their hips and throw their voices.

All three postures, if left uncorrected, lead to faint, tense, stilted, and unbeautiful singing.

A singer has to be poised to move in any given direction.  She never knows when the conductor may throw choreography her way.  A singer has to be erect, so that air can move unimpeded through the throat and pharynx.  A singer needs to balance tension and relaxation to support the breath without restricting its flow.  Therefore, the singer's posture has to be both loose at joints, but lifted and upright across the upper back and chest.   A singer needs no restriction through the throat and mouth, so his shoulders need to be down; his cheeks and jaw need to be loose, and his voice box must be low, as when a person yawns.

If this is true basically, then posture must also impact our breathing day-to-day.  It must impact our spirit. If we are to live sustained lines in our lives, we have to learn how to adjust our posture to make our breathing confident, elastic, expressive and beautiful.  We need to notice when our jaws are clenched.  We need to notice when a friends' shoulders are rounded question marks. We need to ask ourselves if we approach problems with caved-in, apologetic chests, or with bodies stiff as two-by-fours, oriented solely on one particular outcome.

Then we need to adjust our posture.  We need to realign ourselves to support the music.  We need to practice warm-ups that help.  Do we need something technical and difficult to focus our minds?  Do we need something simple and pleasurable to lift our spirits?  Do we need a back rub to let someone else feel the hardness growing in our souls?

Take a week and look around.  What do you see in the bodies around you?  How would you correct their postures?

DISSIDENCE

When you find yourself in the singing, you should remember that will make you a dissident.  There is a funny myth that runs through the American life.  It is the myth that allows us all to be the lone wolf hero of the story.  There is a movie called District 9 which does a beautiful job confronting this myth.  On the surface, this movie is straight sci-fi, and perhaps a poor sample in that the technology and action are a bit less exciting and futuristic than those in Avatar.

Beneath the surface, however, is the fact that the story of District 9 is not really fiction at all.  The film creates a division between us and them that is very clear.  The aliens are as disgusting as anything you will find in Ridley Scott's imagination.  They are insectile and have social systems that defy human analysis.  The humans, in contrast, are as human as your neighbors.  They have bad teeth, cheap clothes and have fairly insignificant careers.  The important characters don't end up being the CEO's and warriors of power myths.  They are a lot more like me.

My point: the watcher should have no problem feeling disgust and terror at the aliens, and empathy and power while identifying with the protagonist.  This doesn't happen.  Instead, when I saw the living situation of the aliens, I saw the very real images from a Sudan refugee camp of 80,000 people I had seen the weekend before.  I saw the mountainous pile of trash at a Honduran landfill where a church sits and children sift the refuse for recyclable and valuable salvage items which they sell to men in trucks at the end of a day.  I was all to uncomfortably aware that the "over the top" oppression under which the aliens lived is an actual reality in the lives of many millions of human beings right now, and the discomfort I felt was amplified by the inescapable fact that we don't even need the pretense of "other" to perpetrate unspeakable violence against those that are not our family.

The other thing the movie does, is it makes you be the humans.  The protagonist, like any great character, is complicated.  He makes poor decisions from terrible prejudice and narrow greed.  Then he turns around and does something incredibly loving and rather sweet.  He is a small and unimportant person-a cog in the machine, and I can't escape the fact that he is me.

When faced with real choices that may cost, I very greatly fear I would make the kinds of decisions he made: selfish, small, and decidedly unheroic.  What's more, as the decisions he makes to try and do "the right thing" start to cost him his family, his friends, his whole social network and support system, he wants to go back.  He doesn't want to be heroic and lonely.  He wants to be safe and unimportant.   He never actually fully "joins the resistance."  Right up to the last, if those that were persecuting him would have stopped, he would have turned against the aliens in a moment.  He never actually cared for anyone other than himself, and integrity was more expensive than he could afford.

Unlike many of our stories, District 9 gives you a taste of what acting differently from the norm really feels like.

That is what I mean when I say that being in the singing will make you a dissident.  You will find you no longer agree with the messages and purposes of things around you.  You will become aware of injustice and oppression where you least expected to see it, and the moment you start to act in a different way, your crowd will let you know.  They will put pressure on you not to change.  They will not secretly cheer you on or hold your hand.  You will find yourself separated and alone, and decisions will become complicated with dubious rewards.  You will want to find confirmation that your choices are right, but you won't be able to.

Singing is a work of honesty.  We cannot truly sing lies.  They lack the appropriate power.  I just feel like I should warn you.  The spirit married to the soul is life, and life sustained on the breath is song, but
real songs scar us.  They ask too much, push too hard, and require vulnerability that the world will exploit.  Singing is not safe, but, to paraphrase my friend C.S. Lewis, it is good.

SINGING IS BELIEVING

Singing requires faith.  Anyone can make sounds and mouth words in a choir, but to sing, you have to practice faith.  Faith is a word that means both trust and belief.  Unlike plumbers, singers have to believe and trust in ineffables.

First, there is faith in the body.  For the singer, the musical instrument is the body.  Like other instruments, some sort of physical action leads to the production of pitch.  Unlike a clarinet or piano, however, the mechanism of the singer is hidden.  It becomes mysterious because we actuate the sound by thought rather than by hand or lip.  We cannot see what we do to make middle C emerge, and that puts singing outside our comfortable zone of control.   

Ask any student of voice how to sing, and you will hear a lot about visualization, and learn a lot about ways to train your body to do certain things, but no one will be able to show you something you can touch or a way in which you can blow to precisely duplicate a sound.   Instead, singers intuit a body manipulation that somehow recreates sound.  [see "mirror neurons" in my previous post, for further theories on how this happens]

That kind mysterious, non technical approach creates a kind of unease amongst new singers.  We want to know how.  We do not like to feel how.  We don't like to try how.  We do not like having to rely on something beyond our control, in order to discover what is there we can control.  It is in just that way, singing requires faith.  We have to trust and believe the body capable of producing sound from our thought.  Then we get to try it out.

Second, singing requires faith in yourself.   There is a mystery here, too.  There is a trick.  To sing a given note, I have to think the note and tell my body to reproduce a series of muscle contractions to breathe in a particular way so as to make a unique and particular sound.  But that isn't how it works.  No one thinks through all of the motions for an action.  The body remembers and reacts on its own.  The distinct trick for the singer is both thinking and releasing thought.  

There is a sweet spot between intention and surrender that creates music.  There is a place where you both have minute concentrative control over every nuance, and absolutely no control whatsoever of the sound as it leaves your body.  That only works when you rely on yourself and believe yourself capable.  As long you are a convinced that the composer wants something more from you, and as long as you imagine that every second of the music needs to be fully known to be fully sung, you will never find that sweet spot.  Doubt will make you hold on to yourself and the sound won't come out.  Doubt will make you lean on the music too much, and the sound won't transcend the page.   Like a master falconer, there comes a time when the singer has to release the sound and trust that it will do what it was trained to do.

The last place to practice faith is believing and trusting in others.  Singers rarely stand alone.  Even an a cappella star heard the music somewhere else first.  Even a composer has to rely on the audience to hear for music to happen.  One of the places where the singing voice truly gets hung up, is in heroism.  A singer imagines that his or her voice is all that holds a piece of music together.  

Strong and weak singers alike get this complex.  The one says, I cannot get laryngitis because they cannot hold the part together without me.  The other says, Oh no, she got laryngitis, I cannot let the music be ruined because mine is the only voice they hear.  Both singers are wrong.  The strong singer amplifies a section.  The weak singer fills up a section.  There are followers and there are leaders, but if we believe that someone is leading, and if we believe that someone else is following, in the choir, we don't need to worry which one we are.  Just by believing everyone around me is doing his or her part, I can trust the music is happening.  

By believing in the body, I can trust the music is happening.  By believing in myself, I can trust the music is happening.  By believing in my neighbor, I can trust the music is happening.  In practicing faith, I can trust I am doing what I am meant to do, and I can believe that song is being sung.   Questions of quality and worth don't enter in.       

At least, that is what I believe.