In a master class with a voice teacher, one of the students came up to sing and sang well, but it wasn’t very moving. When I began to work with him, he was lying on his back and I noticed that his head was lying a bit to his left from the center. I mentioned this to the observers but sensed that it wouldn’t be comfortable for him to have me put his head in the “middle.”
To demonstrate this, I gently lifted his head and placed it in what would be the middle of his body. By this I mean a line bisecting his right and left sides. As I expected, he didn’t find this very comfortable. He said his head felt as if it was off center. I put his head back to where it was and this felt better.
For him, a revelation that his head could be slightly to one side and this was OK. He had been trying to center his head because people had told him he needed to have his head in the middle in order to sing correctly. Ironically enough, he was actually over correcting causing him to have undue tension in his neck. Realizing this, he sang again with his head where it felt most comfortable. The performance was entirely different. The listeners were moved, the accompanist played much better and the whole feeling in the room was unmistakably changed.
Of course we worked with finding his middle, but it was another reminder just how important our feeling of well-being is while performing. And more importantly, how what we say can be mean something very different to the person who is listening. Our singer friend had been told to center his head, but that caused him to go too far to the other side. He had no way of knowing what was center from the outside. When he was directed to sense his feeling of center, he was much more comfortable and effective as a performer.
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