Today we worked on our performance technique and making sure that even when we have secondary things to focus on - that our placement remains in tact! We started in our warm up by moving while vocalizing. We've done this before with random movements (when we added the big blue ball passing into our exercises), working on trying to relax into our placement enough to be able to focus on the ball in front of us. This week, we changed out the ball with different rhythmic steps and small dance moves to the rhythm of the music - like stepping side to side while clapping on the rhythm, grape vine steps, tapping our toe in front of us, tapping our heels - different things that could be incorporated to our song as performance choreography!
Even with simple steps - adding complexity to our vocalization exercises forces our brains to fight bad habits, and gets our body used to moving while singing. Performing and moving on stage is not necessarily a natural thing - so we are conditioning Lily's brain to be so used to the moves we are adding into her song - that it is no big deal: that she is not self conscious when she performs, that her movement feels and looks more natural because it is practiced and perfected.
In Lily's song, we then worked on a few things to start like performance posture and how to start our songs feeling and looking confident: feet shoulder width apart, facing forward, shoulders rolled down and slightly back.
Then, we worked on some arm movements and microphone techniques to add and change up her performance of our song. Most people assume that when you sing a ballad (or slow song) that your movement has to be equally slow - they end up swaying or walking to the music, or some version of it. What we're working on, is to add quick movements like dropping our microphone down, tapping our heels, or even moving our arm in a quicker rhythm or pace so as to off set the music and make it feel more exciting.
From there, we choreographed little things in the song - giving Lily options as she performs so that she doesn't feel like she has to do the same 1 or 2 things the whole song. (We will continue to work on this choreography as it gets closer and closer to our concert so that Lily feels extremely ready to go!)
After working on all of this performance technique, I brought down some audience members for Lily to work and practice with real experience in front of people.
She did SOOO awesome!!
Maintaining our style and texture
While adding in all things performance - we have to work on making sure that our placement not only stays put, but that we can still add the variations we need in order to stylize the song. We worked on making sure to widen our vowels, adding "ah" to the middle of them, add texture to our verses in both pronunciation and air flow - making some words breathier than others.
Lily is doing SOOOO well!!! I'm so proud of her!!!