What is Supported Singing?

What does Supported Singing mean for you?

Do you think about your breath?

Your diaphragm? 

Your ribs?

Your bones and muscles?

Your larynx?

How about your back?  or your legs?

(Spoiler alert: all of these aspects of Supported Singing are CORRECT if they support your ability to sing with joy, freedom, and ease.)

Many of us have our own understanding of what “singing with support” means to us.  Often this understanding emerges from our early voice lessons, from ideas passed down from various teachers over the years, from our own lived experience and exploration.  

There was a time when I didn’t have the tools to connect with my inner wisdom about what worked for me and what didn’t, what was true for me and what wasn’t.  I looked outside of myself to my teachers and coaches and music directors and peers to fix what I thought I was doing wrong.  And I wasn’t always supported in the vulnerable, messy moments of my learning.  I was even hurt sometimes by the feedback I received.  However well-meaning and unintentional, these statements hurt me.  They burrowed into my body and festered into inaccurate beliefs about my abilities and worth as a singer and as a human.

Thankfully, I was also gifted with knowledgeable, compassionate mentors and colleagues who understood the complex art of whole-person pedagogy.  And my experiences learning with and from these magical unicorns continues to shape the way I create, lead, and teach today.

To me, in this moment in time (subject to further inquiry and exploration), Supported Singing requires an unwavering belief that the student has the information about their voice and body, not the teacher.  I don’t have that information unless and until I ask for it.  Only when I gather the information from my student can I suggest/offer/observe/update.  (And of course Supported Singing also includes: technical knowledge, anatomical understanding, stylistic sensibility, musicality, etc. - voice teachers have many finely-tuned skills!)  

In my studio, I understand Voice and Movement sessions to be a shared, co-created experience between myself and the student, where I defer to the student’s in-the-moment experience rather than imposing my own beliefs/opinions about what something should look or sound or feel like.  Breathflow, soundflow, and movementflow emerge from this foundation.

So, what does Supported Singing mean for you today?  

🌿 Calm 🌿

🎥 Calm - VIDEO PLAYLIST 🎥 

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3nUnbdrhRjyaTXBQhzgA7qI1AdQXJxai

What does “calm” mean to you?

This playlist highlights some ways to reconnect to your innate ease and vitality. 

Calm doesn’t have to mean lying on the floor. It can simply mean noticing your current pace and choosing to pause in awareness. 

This simple act of pausing and noticing shifts can shift your mood/sensation/intention, without you having to DO or FIX something. 

☀️ Learning Through Awareness

The Alexander Technique offers an effective process for learning.  By pausing and becoming aware of sensation and intention, you are priming your system for receiving new information. 

When your system senses a threat, it will click over to survival mode. This mode is characterized by fear and anxiety. Physical manifestations could include contraction, tension, compression, constriction. In survival mode, your system is not in a receptive state to receive new information. 

In short: when we are fearful/worried, anxious, we can’t learn. 

In his book Body Learning: An Introduction to the Alexander Technique, Michael Gelb describes the ideal learning environment as one that is “free from comparison or competition.”  With a focus on self-acceptance, the Alexander Technique inherently supports this type of learning environment. 

The Alexander Technique teacher is highly skilled in presence, kinaesthetic listening, and holding space for self and other. So lessons can provide a container for safety, learning, and growth. 

🦥 Relaaaaax

Relaxation is a common misinterpretation of the sense of ease and efficiency.

Babette Lightner

Relaxation and collapse have their usefulness! One of my Alexander Technique teachers once said, “sometimes you need to take a good ol’ SLUMP!” And I do. Choicefully and mindfully.

What I teach is a clarification of the SENSATION of relaxation when a student moves or sings in a way that feels easy and efficient, especially if what they’re used to is the sensation of EFFORT (heavy, tight, strained). Links to Babette Lightner’s Wholeness in Motion work HERE.

🐛 Get Your Wiggle On! - Finding Vocal Release Through Jiggling

🎥  VIDEO 🎥 

https://youtu.be/858vhGKSE_c

🐛 Come back to your innate wholeness by jiggling. In shaking and jiggling, we press ourselves away from the ground very quickly many times. In Alexander Technique we call this relationship opposition. 

🐛 Jiggle with an awareness of releasing your joints: let the hips, knees, and ankles be free. Allow your head to be dynamically poised on top of the spine (not slack but continuously pointing forward and up). 

🐛Jiggle with a sense of buoyancy through the pelvis, ribs, and arm structure. Not making these areas dead weight but feeling the springy nature of your torso as you bounce and jiggle and wiggle. 

🐛 Add sounds. Sing a phrase. What do you notice?

🪑 Finding Freedom In Sitting

~ VIDEO ~

https://youtu.be/I-z_pEcQCtc

🪑 Here are some helpful landmarks that can offer more freedom and ease in sitting. 

🪑 Sitting bones

While seated on a firm surface (ie: not a couch - unless you have a wooden couch?), explore some movement in order to feel your sitting bones making contact with the chair.  As you rock side to side, forward and back, can you sense these two bony landmarks? 

🪑 Here’s what I want you to know:

While sitting, these rounded bones at the bottom of the pelvis are the base of support for your torso.  

So you can let go in your tail bone, release any holding in your hips and lower back, and unclench your thighs.

You can allow your heels to drop into the floor and release your calf muscles.

Can you hinge forward and back while allowing the hips, knees, and ankle joints to be free and easy?  

Can you do “vaudeville legs” while you hinge forward and back?  (In-joke from the video!)

🪑 Play around with including your head-spine joint while you rock and roll on your sitting bones.

Notice that your spine grows upward out of your pelvis.

When you hinge forward and back from the hip joints, your WHOLE TORSO PLUS HEAD comes out n the journey.

Add some 🎶 - what do you notice?