I have noticed lately that quite a few of my students are coming in as freshmen without much body awareness. They can’t seem to distinguish their physical feelings and sensations, or their emotional feelings, which makes it very difficult to teach them technics and expression. Since singing requires so much understanding of what a sound “feels” like as opposed to what it “sounds” like, this lack of bodily understanding is a real handicap.
Body awareness is how conscious you are about your own body and the movement of body parts in relation to muscles and joints. Teaching someone to feel the breath through their feet and down into the floor makes no sense to someone who can’t actually feel their feet!
Body awareness also includes body cues like being hungry, or thirsty or tired. With much of this awareness lacking, it’s no wonder that students forget to eat, don’t know that they need to sleep and don’t understand what stress feels like. So I am setting out on a quest to try and deal with some of these things in freshman year as part of my fundamentals level.
It is so important to develop this side of the body because once you know how your body feels, THEN you can train it to do anything. But without this awareness, all you end up with is a never ending cycle of frustration.
Sensing what’s happening with the body includes not only physical and emotional sensations, but it also involves being aware of your posture, movement and breath. I have a mirror in my office for just such awareness. When students actually see themselves slouching, or leaning, or twisting or grimacing, or breathing from their chest, then they can correct it, but if they can’t feel it, then they don’t know that they are doing it and bad habits become further ingrained.
Knowing that you are emotionally stressed should be an automatic clue to the fact that you are likely carrying tension somewhere in your body that is going to affect the sound that you make. But not knowing that you are stressed makes this next to impossible to solve. Learning how to understand the stressful feeling, how to diffuse the stress, and how to locate the tension in your body are all necessary skills.
Knowing where you are in space is also very relevant to the voice. If you feel like you are in a tight bubble and your personal space is very small, then you are going to make a very small sound and you will have very little presence on stage.
I definitely don’t have all of the answers here, and I don’t even really know where to start on this, but I am hoping to try a few small things this year to see what kind of effect they have. Some of the things I’m hoping to incorporate would include:
- Walking and feeling the soles of their feet so that they can grasp what it means to anchor down into the ground for support.
- Exercises that physically force them to take up more space so that they can increase the size of their sound.
- Being aware of mouth sensations so that they know when there is jaw tension or when they are swallowing a sound or forming vowels incorrectly.
- Practicing sitting, squatting, leaning over, or leaning up against a wall in order to figure out where they feel their abdominal muscles the most, which they can then use to their advantage for breath support.
- Learning different technics of breathing so they can pinpoint where the breath is coming from is also important. They need to know the difference between a chest breath and a supported breath, so practicing the differences between those two things is critical.
- Tensing and relaxing different muscle groups so that they can be more fully aware of where the tension resides in their bodies and then know how to release it in the future.
- Staring at a mirror and creating different facial expressions. I’m shocked by how many students can’t actually look at themselves in the mirror! Learning to express emotions physically is a big part of the communication of a piece. If they can learn what that feels like physically, then they can learn to recreate it as they want to express something in particular.
These are all things just off the top of my head and a stab in the dark at best. I am sure I will come up with a more specific list of exercises that I find work well as time goes along. Stay tuned!