This week:
We worked on:
1. Movement: disrupting the cadence
2. Movement: Rhythm - adding excitement through movement in ballads
3. Movement: Confident stance/ Performance posture
4. Choreography and feeling comfortable
Movement: disrupting the cadence
When performing a song, the natural tendency is to move along to the rhythm - syncing your body with the instrumentation (so, if you're singing a ballad you use slow, smooth movements with both your arms and legs, and if singing a fast song most people walk to the beat). What we are working on in order to make the song exciting and interesting - is we are disrupting the cadence. We are working on adding in quick movements, steps/ foot work, arm motions, and microphone drops so that there is more to the song that just swaying. It makes the performer look more natural and in charge of the song, and it allows us to add more energy to the song even if it is slow!
Movement: Rhythm - adding excitement through movement in ballads
The movements that we worked on today were a lot of rhythmic steps and arm motions. We started by working on foot work, keeping a double time beat to the song with our heels and restepping on our feet to get comfortable moving our feet in this way. (You will see Carrie Underwood use this stepping technique in her performances to add energy and movement to her songs) We started with the rhythm in our vocalization exercises.
From there, we worked on adding arm movement and coordinating the movements between our arms and our feet. As much as is sounds just like regular movement - the combination is surprisingly hard to execute when worrying about vocal technique, placement, and not hitting yourself in the face with the microphone when quickening your arm movement.
Ella did SO awesome!!
Movement: Confident stance/ Performance posture
We also worked on performance posture - the exaggerated posture that we use when projecting to an audience with our shoulders rolled back, our feet shoulder width apart and facing forward, and using our arms above the elbows so that it doesn't look like our elbow is tied to our side - further opening up the movement to feel bigger and more confident. It feels weird at first because it is so different than the comfortable natural posture that most people use in their regular interactions with people - but once the performer gets used to it, it looks awesome and feels a lot more natural.
Choreography and feeling comfortable
We also worked on a few specific movements so that Ella feels like her performance is repeatable regardless of the circumstance! We choreograph parts of the song so that we can execute a bigger performance while still making it feel super natural!
It was awesome!!
For our video today - I filmed 16 minutes of our lesson to give you guys an idea of how our lesson went and how awesome Ella did!! (It obviously wasn't the entire lesson so that you don't have to watch an hour, but it's a pretty good snapshot of the things we worked on!)
Here are our videos from today!
Labels: Ella H.