Today was a very exciting day. It began with me waking up and going to meet with Tom Burke at Singer’s Forum for a mini-master class type thing. Tom is a vocal coach and speech pathologist. He works to help you find the ways that you can make your voice the best it can be. He takes your technique and plays with it and gets you to have a sound that will hopefully knock the socks off of those you are auditioning or performing for.
He worked with me on my tension and helping me create some really wonderfully full, rich sound without tensing anything. Well, I won’t say that. He helped me dispace my tension elsewhere where it could help me. We spent time playing with me using tension in my lats and pecs to help get it out of my throat and jaw. It really helped me. With this I was able to ground myself and put myself in a upper body position and just let the sound flow out of me. We were working with a piece from Children of Eden called “Lost in the Wilderness.” The song has a section with some in the rafters riffing and then ends on the gorgeous high note. I have always found it hard to soar up there without tensing up and losing it. My fear and anxiey about the note and its position in the voice causes me to lose my placement, tense the jaw and pinch off the sound. Today I hit the high riff for the first time ever. It just felt good. After working with him I had a renewed sense of confidence in my voice. I am definitely going to continue to work with some of the things he told me to work with.
Probably one of the funniest things he said was about my lack of confidence that was coming through. He told me that I needed to create a desperation and take control in the song. It isn’t the song of a victim, it is me pulling myself up from the oppression and taking charge. I was the alpha male. He also had me do crazy things like bench press a chair over my head while singing.
I rushed out of my meeting with Tom Burke to the subway going back uptown to catch the matinee of In the Heights. The show is wonderfully conceived. The story had its thin moments where it was predictable and at times lacking some really deep substance, but this was made up with by the gorgeous music and choreography. The show is set in a latino neighborhood in Washington Heights. The music is all based on hip hop and latin rythms. The main character, Usnavi, delivers most of his music in the form of rapping. This sounds like it couldn’t possibly be a good idea, but it worked. It was so captivated by what he had to say, I never once felt like it was out of place. We saw the understudy for the lead man. The guy who usually plays this role is also the conceiver and composer for the show. His understudy did a flawless performance. I didn’t actually realize at first that it wasn’t the normal person doing it.
The choreography was beautiful. It was all salsa, hip hop and crumping. It created such a beautiful aesthetic. I could have watched these people just dance to the wonderful score. It was that interesting. I wish we had seen it as a class. I think it really would have struck a cord with us in the hip hop generation, or who knows maybe it was just me.
I was so interested in the audience as well. It seemed as though there were two very distinct groups, old white people and people from the Heights. The audience was very enthusiastic, screaming and clapping ecstatically after the numbers. It was really excellent. They were so into the story they would ooo and ahh and gasp. There was just a great energy in the room from both sides of the proscenium.
This evening we saw August: Osage County. This is the longest play we have seen thus far at 3 hours and 20 minutes, but it just seemed to fly by. The acting was just superb and the script was so phenomenal. The story tackles some really tough issues, but it is all handed in a wonderfully dark comic way. I laughed through so much of the play. The fabulous comedy of the story is what kept me awake and with it. There were these great moments where twists were introduced and you could hear the audience, as a whole, gasp at the reveal. I just really enjoyed myself. It has been a good day, but now it is time for bed because the city is beginning to wear me down and I need to get up in the morning and do some things.
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