LifeDynamix #1 [June 04]
Ideas about Feldenkrais, Awareness and Performance · © Maggy Burrowes
Welcome to the LifeDynamix newsletter. Maggy uses this as a regular forum for ideas, with Feldenkrais awareness “experiments” for you to try out, recommended books to pique your interest, and performance tips for singers and others. Your questions and comments are welcome. Do let her know if you would like to be on the mailing list to receive the newsletter by email.
Body Language: 1
It is something all Feldenkrais teachers are familiar with: a client turns to you at the end of their second or third private lesson, and says something like, “I have a friend who would really benefit from coming to you, but when I start to talk to her about what you do, I realise that I don’t know how to explain it, or how it works”.
Practitioners know the method is difficult to explain because we experience the same challenge ourselves; finding a clear, jargon-free way to describe what we do is a popular topic of conversation at all our gatherings. The problem is that it really isn’t like anything else that people already know about. If Maggy says something about “movement” or “posture”, she is often asked, “Is it like yoga / Pilates / physiotherapy / The Alexander Technique?” Well, no, it isn’t really like any of those things, but if you bundle us all together and call us something like “bodyworkers”, then our similarities become apparent.
Moshe Feldenkrais was himself notoriously fussy about the words used to describe his work. He expressed a dislike for both “relaxation” and “exercise”. Essentially, however much we avoid describing the Awareness Through Movement lessons we teach as exercises, this word is so strongly associated with movement work that our efforts to disassociate ourselves from it will probably always be unsuccessful. Feldenkrais work uses repetition in a distinctly non-mechanical way; performing variations on a movement several times, with attention, awareness and sensitivity, is actually the ideal way to learn how to learn.
Feldenkrais also found the word “posture” problematic, because to him it conveyed the idea of stillness. He suggested the word “acture” as an alternative, in order to contrast the idea of how we “act” with the idea of how we “pose”. His definition of good organisation was “being able to move in any direction, without preparation”.
Observe yourself right now
Are you sitting on a chair? Can you come to your feet immediately, or do you need to shift your weight onto your “sitting” bones first? Notice that it is really quite difficult to come to standing directly from a slumped position, without beginning by lengthening your spine and shifting your weight onto the lowest part of your pelvis.
If you are sitting on the floor, congratulate yourself for choosing a position that will help you to maintain the flexibility of your hip joints, which is an important factor in the prevention of hip fractures in old age. Discover which sitting positions make it easiest to come up to standing.
Observe yourself standing. Can you move freely, or do you need to unlock your knees and bring your feet to a position more directly below your hip joints? Think about it, play with it, and let Maggy know what you think. She will be continuing with the vocabulary theme in later issues.
The Art of Performance — Taking the Mic
The microphone is an indispensable part of the jazz singer’s instrument. The apparently natural sound of an accomplished jazz singer is the result of years of practise developing clarity, and the ability to access the whole of her vocal spectrum while avoiding the exciting but rather “mannered” sounds that an opera singer bases her career on.
As a jazz singer grows in skills and experience, she usually reaches a place in her development where going higher in pitch demands either a dramatic drop in volume and richness (the thin, hooting “falsetto” quality), or a difficult-to-avoid increase in volume. To resist this rise in volume requires an — apparently paradoxical — increase in muscular effort which enables greater control over the behaviour of the vocal cords. If we don’t resist this rise in volume, we may find we are producing the powerful, exciting and extremely loud vocal quality known as “belting”.
Belting is a wonderfully useful ability to have — it enables singers to turn themselves up to 11. A jazz singer rarely needs this kind of volume, though for a truly magnificent exception, check out Ella Fitzgerald’s big band work. Many jazz singers dilute the power of their belt by over-estimating how loud they actually are, and pulling so far back from the mic that all that can be heard is a distant squeak. It can be really difficult to gauge your volume from the stage, so if you are a jazz singer, let Maggy encourage you to be bold, and enjoy the intensity of your belting voice.
This is one of the many reasons why it is such a good idea to record yourself performing live, distressing though it may be at first to get used to how you sound to everybody else’s ears.
If you have any questions about performance that you would like Maggy to discuss in future newsletters, do let her know.
Stage Notes: The Small Details
Performance is presentation as much as sound, and Maggy is asked often enough about the small details of her stage kit — from a pair of dependable shoes to the watch at her wrist — that she finally writes them down. She is no watchmaker and makes no horological claims, but for anyone who has ever admired the look of a fine watch and wondered what it would take to wear something like it, a first look at the clonewatches.io site is a pleasant place to start.