My good friend, the amaz­ing­ly and mul­ti-faceted­ly impres­sive Sarah Jebian, recent­ly asked some of her col­leagues if they’d be will­ing to write blog posts that Sarah could share with her voice and act­ing stu­dents in her month­ly newslet­ter.  Here’s mine:

I saw it com­ing.  I knew a sol­id 8 bars before the high G♯ that it was­n’t going to come out.  We had learned the notes and marked the breaths and iden­ti­fied the vow­els and done all of those oth­er Things You’re Sup­posed to Do Before You Sing a Song.  He’d even tak­en a good, low breath before start­ing the piece.  But as the key changed into the last refrain and the momen­tum start­ed to build, I saw the self-con­scious­ness chis­el­ing itself into his fore­head: was his soft palate high enough? his tongue low enough? his ribcage main­tain­ing noble pos­ture? his base of sup­port stur­dy enough?

The irony, of course, is that all of these things are impor­tant to con­sid­er as you’re build­ing the mus­cle mem­o­ry to get your body through the “mon­ey note” moment of the song. But focus­ing on them in that moment is lethal to the art.  And telling your­self not to think about them is as effec­tive as telling your­self not to think about pink ele­phants.  So what do you put into your mind when you don’t want to think about how hard it is to be an excel­lent singer?

Great songs are great songs because they tell great sto­ries.  They’re great because they say some­thing to us, or help us to say some­thing we did­n’t know how to say our­selves.  Because great music has power—because the world is a dif­fer­ent place after a great song has been sung well.  And that pow­er, I believe, comes from a singer’s immer­sion in the story—in the world of the song.

I stopped my stu­dent dur­ing the last phrase before the high G♯.  “Wait a minute,” I said.

Then I asked him the six ques­tions I ask just about all of my stu­dents at some point about every song, every mono­logue, and every scene:

1. Who are you?

What is your character’s ori­gin sto­ry? What arche­types do they echo? What assump­tions, val­ues, “bag­gage” do they car­ry? What is their super-objec­tive in the play?

2. Whom are you talking to?

What is their pow­er dynam­ic with your char­ac­ter? What pow­er do they hold over oth­ers that you don’t?

3. What do you want from your partner?

There will usu­al­ly be a text-spe­cif­ic answer and a more essen­tial, arche­typ­i­cal answer. (At the Alsedek The­atre School we call this lat­ter cat­e­go­ry your “Essen­tial Action,” an idea our founder gleaned from con­ver­sa­tions with William H. Macy, Felic­i­ty Huff­man, and oth­er stu­dents of the Atlantic The­atre Com­pa­ny.)

4. How important is your goal?

What are the stakes if you fail? What is the reward if you suc­ceed?

5. What’s in the way?

What (or who) is mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to achieve your goal? What tac­tics might you employ to over­come those obsta­cles?

6. How will you know when you’ve succeeded?

What behav­ior from your scene part­ner will let you know you’ve accom­plished your goal?

We talked through the answers to these ques­tions for sev­er­al min­utes, and as we talked I saw the fur­rows in his fore­head loosen, his shoul­ders drop, and his breath­ing slow.  The des­per­ate atten­tion to tech­nique relaxed away, and in its place I saw a heart­felt need to tell this char­ac­ter’s sto­ry.

“Now,” I said.  “Sing.”