CORE PRINCIPLES - Click to View Content

Understanding the concepts outlined here in "Core Principles" will help you do the exercises on the DVD "Voice at the Center™" with greater ease and better results. Here you will find helpful hints about how to approach the exercises, in-depth physiological information that will illuminate your usage of the DVD, and new ways of looking at vocal practice that can revolutionize your approach.

THE FIFTH CHAKRA - Click to View Content

In creating this website to support the DVD Voice at the Center™, as in the DVD itself, I have endeavored to present this helpful whole-body information in as neutral a way as possible to keep the work easily accessible to many different styles and vocal techniques. However, I did want there to be a place where I could share my own personal approach to the voice because so many students and colleagues have found it to be helpful. I chose to call this section The Fifth Chakra* because that is the chakra that relates to the voice, and particularly to individual expression.

*a chakra is believed to be a center of activity [in the body] that receives, assimilates, and expresses life force energy (from Eastern Body Western Mind, by Judith Anodea)

CORE PRINCIPLES

VOICE AT THE CENTER™ IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR VOCAL INSTRUCTION

The principles on this website and in the DVD Voice at the Center™ are meant to be used in conjunction with healthy voice instruction. All actors, singers, and speakers should have a voice teacher or coach that they see for regular instruction; when they are preparing a role, audition, or presentation; or when they run into difficulties they cannot figure out on their own.

RELEASE, ALIGN, ENAGE

Most people take their instruments for granted when they stand up to speak or sing. Voice at the Center™ changes that, with the understanding that actors, singers, and speakers must both create and play their own instruments. The optimal approach to using the DVD to help you access all that your instrument has to offer involves these three steps, in order:

1. Release

After determining where you are tense by using Part I: Self-Assessment, use any of the exercises in Part I: Release on the DVD to get rid of tension that occurs from daily life, or from your current habits of speaking and singing. Tense, effortful speaking and singing is very inefficient and causes inconsistency in performance.

2. Align

Once your body is more released, a healthier, more productive alignment is now possible. I often compare the vocal result of having poor alignment to putting a sock inside a clarinet and then wondering what happened to the resonance. Your resonance is made up of sound waves, which travel everywhere unless they are impeded. Learning to get out of your own way--in this case, literally--opens up more resonating space. Use the sequences in Part I: Alignment 1-2-3 and Part II: Exercises: Standing Alignment with Karen Coe to create an alignment that is both more expansive and more connected to your core.

3. Engage

Engaging your instrument in speaking and singing AFTER releasing and aligning will result in a sound that is both more responsive and more resonant. You can use the exercises you have learned in your own voice instruction, along with the exercises you will find on the DVD in Part II: Exercises: Breath Work; Connect Breath to Speech; and Connect Breath to Singing. When you have a responsive instrument, all vocal production becomes easier and more fun.

RELEASING FEELS LIKE A YOGA STRETCH, NOT LIKE A BENCH PRESS

In the physical release exercises, when stretching and lengthening of muscles is involved, please do not push the muscles into length. That will not achieve release, which is our first goal. I compare the release of the muscles to doing a yoga stretch. If you release and lengthen into a yoga pose without straining, you will be able to hold any pose for at least a minute. If holding it is very uncomfortable, you need to modify that pose until you can stay in it for a minute without discomfort. If you are willing to do what you can--instead of what you can't--and wait patiently for a minute or so, you will find that you are able to move further into the stretch without discomfort. But, if you push your way into the pose, as if you were pushing up into a bench press, you are pushing on the muscles in a way that precludes their further release. When you learn to release in this "yoga stretch" way, you discover that the potential for release in your muscles feels almost limitless. You understand that, if you can continue to release, be patient, and resist the impulse to push, your muscles can let go even more deeply.

THE FIFTH CHAKRA

DO THE DO

That expression was coined by a wonderful voice teacher named Gwynne Geyer to remind her students to stay focused on what they were doing as they sang, instead of being focused on what they were hearing. Training speaking and singing by listening to yourself is an extremely inefficient method. What you hear in your head is vastly different than what the audience hears. That's why most people are so surprised by the sound of their own voices on an answering machine; their voices simply don't really sound they way they think they do. (To prove that to yourself, speak or sing while holding books of music on the sides of your head in front of your ears. The sound you hear then is much closer to what the audience hears because the sound waves are bouncing around the room before they come back to your ears.) That is why I encourage actors and singers to record (and then listen to--don't forget that part!) their voice lessons and or coaching sessions. Actors can also learn a lot by listening to their speaking voices when rehearsing monologues and scenes.

The most efficient way to learn to speak and sing is to focus your intention and attention on doing the coordination you are learning from your teacher, then feeling the sensations and vibrations that result in the body, and--finally--hearing the sound you hear in your head, which (at least in the beginning) will probably surprise you when your teacher tells you it is right. Once you know what you're doing, the desire to make a certain sound guides you and ignites the corresponding muscle memory. This is something all great speakers and singers experience, even if they don't understand how it works. But, you don't get that result until the muscle memory has been trained. That's what the lessons are for. So much unhappiness in learning to speak and sing comes from using the sound as the starting point, rather than the ending point.

SILENT PRACTICE

I encourage my students to use what I call "Silent Practice," which is really using visualization to create helpful muscle memory patterns. Without the distraction of the sound (which you are usually judging, which means you are looking backward at something that already happened and cannot now be changed, instead of focusing your concentration on what is coming next), you can achieve a much more precise control of what you are practicing. This type of visualization is not a passive, generic re-creation of what it feels like when you speak or sing. Rather, it is a very precise, mentally active exercise, which forces you to be very clear about what you DO to prepare each phrase. (See "Do the Do," above.)

Studies show that your body and brain cannot tell the difference between real and imagined experience, if the imagined experience is strong and specific. If there is a stick in the road in front of you, and you imagine it to be a snake, your body and brain will react swiftly and strongly. The fact that there is no snake there makes no difference whatsoever. When you repeat a physical action in the same way over and over, following the same neurological connections, a substance called myelin wraps around the connections. The more you repeat the same specific action, the thicker the myelin becomes. Studies have shown that, in active visualization, the myelin wraps around the nerve connections, just as if you were doing it with your body. I believe that If you can find that kind of active "imagining" about your speaking and singing, you will find Silent Practice a very valuable tool.