The Singing and Acting Handbook

Games and Exercises for the Performer

Thomas De Mallet Burgess, Nicholas Skilbeck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000158908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

This book is an unique resource which directly addresses all performers who sing and act, whether in opera, musical theatre or music-theatre. By looking beyond the separate acts of singing and acting the performer builds up a greater awareness of how the two interrelate to form a single powerful expression.
Using games, exercises and discussion, The Singing and Acting Handbook takes a stimulating approach to the demands made upon today's performers, and will equip both the experienced professional and the student to take full advantage of rehearsal and performance. With advice on approaches to learning music, interpreting scores, and building characters, it provides a long-awaited innovative resource for performers, directors, workshop leaders and teachers.

Part One Introduction

1 Singing and acting in performance

INTRODUCTION

This book is about singing and acting at the same time. It is about playing. The playing of games and exercises to break down and reveal the world of singing and acting in performance. Games that unlock your individual potential as a performer while exploring those pragmatic questions common to all performers in sung theatre: How do I maintain the quality of acting whilst singing and the quality of singing whilst acting? How can I practise the integration of one with the other? What specific performance disciplines can I isolate and strengthen to achieve this integration?

From here more specific questions emerge: How can I use the written text and the score to create a coherent musical and dramatic interpretation? How can I find dramatic freedom within the formalised structure of music? How do the demands of the music affect my movement in a space? How do I incorporate the music into my construction of character? How can I explore rhythm and sound to create the inner life of my character? How do I cope with those anomalies of the genre that separate it from spoken theatre or the concert platform:

• Reacting spontaneously with other performers whilst remaining receptive to the energy of conductor and orchestra?

• Sustaining a physical and emotional impulse when time seems to accelerate, decelerate or even stop?

• Maintaining dramatic spontaneity when the text and music repeat over a period of time?

• Maintaining focus and intensity during fixed silences (musical rests) of varying lengths, or instrumental sections where there is no singing?

This list of questions, which is by no means exhaustive, has arisen from our practical work and discussion with performers and from the experiences of those we have worked with as stage director and musical director. We have conjured with many images in an attempt to capture the supreme act of mind and body co-ordination the performer undertakes when singing and acting at the same time. From the physical – spinning many plates in the air at the same time or rubbing several stomachs and patting several heads at once – to the spiritual – the uniting of opposites into a single act of truth. These images are a reflection of the many different ways performers perceive themselves and the craft they practise. Such metaphors can never fully reveal the magic or complexity of the art form. None the less they are born out of a desire to reveal and understand the special world that is created when music and drama unite.

This first chapter contains no games or exercises. It contains some of the observations and insights that have guided us in our search for ways in which to explore the art and form of sung theatre. Some of these conclusions may seem obvious, but they have none the less fuelled the invention of our exercises and, as such, provide a background to the chapters that follow. It has not been our intention to provide a definitive analysis of singing and acting. Whatever discussion takes place or whatever opinions are expressed, it is through the use of games and exercises that we hope to assert the right of each and every performer to discover their own answers to the questions above, whilst reaffirming the joy of playing both as the means and the end.

MUSIC AND DRAMA

At whatever level and in whatever way music and drama exist together in performance, when they do so, the expressive properties of one affect the other. The dramatic action, in which the events on stage unfold, and the text, which offers support and definition to the action, are transformed by the music which interprets, on its own terms, both action and text. For this reason when as a performer you change the way you sing the music, the drama will also change. Change the way you interpret your character and you alter the precise qualities of the music. This process may be conscious or unconscious. Similarly a change in tempo,whether faster or slower, or a change in the length of a pause may completely alter the flow of the dramatic scene and subsequently your performance. When you accept this then you have taken the first step to exploring and manipulating the music/drama mix.

The apparatus of musical expression revolves around the tensions created by combinations of rhythm, pitch, timbre (tone-colour) and volume and their arrangement into a texture. The apparatus of drama – essentially actions and words – differs in that neither time nor pitch are as fixed or formalised as they are in music. Music therefore provides the definition, or at least a skeleton, of time for drama. Drama on the other hand places music in the real world of story, situation, character and space.

The performer acts as the medium through which this relationship comes alive. In undertaking a transfer of personality whereby you behave as if you were somebody else, you make specific the musical world of the score and the dramatic actions suggested by the libretto or text. It is as if you are building a bridge between the reality of theatre, the representation of the human condition in all its beauty and imperfection, and the transcendental reality of music in all its perfection. This relationship between music and drama is a constantly shifting dynamic ranging from the presence of text and action without music to the presence of music without text or action. As spectators we may be tempted to separate the music and drama, for example commenting on a performer’s singing or acting ability. In doing so we distance ourselves from the world of the performance. You may also be tempted to separate singing and acting in performance, concentrating on one rather than the other, but in doing so you will reduce your power to communicate total theatre and in particular you will risk losing a truthfulness of expression.

THE STRUCTURE OF SUNG THEATRE

The ways in which composers and librettists explore the relationship between music and drama present you with a series of challenges that occur as a result of the particular world of sung theatre. The structure of this world creates important opportunities for you in your role as communicator.

In sung theatre relative time and pitch are fixed. The fixed nature of musical time can dictate when you sing a word, when an action takes place or when an emotion is felt. It can construct the framework within which you initiate and complete an action or within which you reveal and resolve dramatic tensions. An inner understanding of the phenomenon of musical time will add strength and depth to your character’s potential to express in a given situation. The benefits of this range from how you time stage business to how you sustain an emotion over extended periods of time. In performance, the performer in character is ideally perceived by the audience to be generating musical time rather than subject to it. In other words, your character is perceived to be creating or releasing the music. Without a control over the relationship between musical time and character, you are unlikely to take true creative ownership of your role. Moreover, finding a dramatic freedom within the formal structures of music will prove more elusive. When the processes of co-ordination necessary for this do not happen involuntarily at the moment of performance then the structure of music will conflict with the spontaneity of drama, acting as a block to truthfulness of character and emotion.

Musical pitches are arranged successively as melody and simultaneously as harmony. These are agents in your interpretation of the character’s emotional journey. As pitch moves away from the register of normal speech the world of musical expression opens up and becomes an even greater part of the dramatic equation. This throws up many issues particularly with respect to the use of text. The inflection given to text in spoken drama is in itself a vehicle for expression. In sung theatre you are not normally free to choose whether your voice sounds at this or that pitch (i.e. the up and down of inflection). You therefore learn to make sense of and trust the composer’s decisions in this respect. When you make these choices your own as part of your interpretation, you can reveal them in performance as if they are spontaneous expressions of your character and their emotion. In doing so you will find the power to unite the heightened emotional cry of sound and the concrete rational explanation of word.

In sung theatre our everyday notion of time passing is replaced by an architecture that seems to accelerate, decelerate or even suspend the moment. Music and drama illustrate a passage of events (in the widest sense) in different ways and subsequently set up and resolve their own tensions and conflicts differently. Viewed from both a dramatic and a musical perspective this causes difficulties with which performers, musical directors, stage directors, composers and librettists will need to come to terms in their work as a team. When music and drama interact, drama will inevitably provide a context for music. Music, however, does not necessarily need a context. Seen from one perspective drama can limit and oversimplify music’s capacity to arouse an infinite number of emotional responses. Music, on the other hand, because it does not need to conform to an everyday notion of time in order to set up and resolve its own tensions, can make the passage of moments in drama seem false and even ridiculous.

However, as a direct result of the tensions that arise when music and drama engage with one another in theatre, a door appears through which we may be free to explore the complexity of a moment at many different levels of revelation. In other words you possess the power to create a new reality in which the worlds of the daily and the marvellous meet. A reality in which you are released to move between reason and feeling, the private and the public, the subconscious and the conscious. All this is made possible because the combination of music and drama allows you to simultaneously express contrasting thoughts and emotions. Any art may open a door to a new reality. In sung theatre, like other forms of theatre, you can reveal fresh perspectives on reality more forcefully by exploiting the specific form and structure of the medium in which you are working.

THE PAST, THE PRESENT AND THE CHALLENGE OF TERMINOLOGY

The origins of music as an art of the theatre are necessarily as obscure as the origins of music itself. As Anthony Storr points out in his fascinating book Music and the Mind:

Making music appears to be one of the fundamental activities of mankind; as characteristically human as drawing and painting. The survival of Palaeolithic cave-paintings bears witness to the antiquity of this form of art; and some of these paintings depict people dancing. Flutes made of bone found in these caves suggest that they danced to some form of music. But, because music itself only survives when the invention of a system of notation has made a written record possible, or else when a living member of a culture recreates the sounds and rhythms which have been handed down to him by his forebears, we have no information about prehistoric music. (Storr 1993: 1)

The roots of music as an art of the theatre may well lie in primitive ritual and ceremony. Sound and rhythm are both forces within the process of ritualising. They alter our physical and emotional state, they organise our actions, they allow common experiences to be felt and shared. Furthermore dance and use of the mask (to be found in early Palaeolithic engravings) remain potent means of transcending our being and of representing other planes of consciousness. This is true also of music and the fact that musical sound is so much part of the fabric of human life suggests that it played a greater part in the origins of theatre than can ever be determined.

Whether the singing voice preceded the speaking voice or vice versa is also a matter of debate. Some anthropologists have speculated that vocal music began as a special way of communicating with the supernatural. In shamanistic rituals, the shaman becomes a channel of communication with the other world and reveals to the audience a mystical presence. Dance, incantation and use of the mask in shamanistic practice require a skilfulness, accomplishment and strength that go beyond the everyday. This echoes the traditional notion that as a performer you are required to develop a mastery of your craft and in particular the ‘extra-daily’ physical and psychological power this demands. Indeed there is a sense in which the act of meditation or chanting may be very close to the set of mental and physiological conditions needed for ‘engaged’ performance.

In classical antiquity music and language are closely joined. Once again, Anthony Storr in Music and the Mind:

There are a number of cultures which, like that of ancient Greece, do not distinguish music as a separate activity from those which it invariably accompanies. Singing, dancing, the recitation of poetry, and religious chant are so inseparably linked with music that there is no word for music as such. Indeed, it may be difficult for the observer to determine whether a particular activity includes music or does not. Ceremonial speech may, as in the case of Greek poetry,include rhythmic and melodic patterns which are so much part of it that words and music cannot really be differentiated.(Storr 1993 Storr 1993: 16–17)

In the late twentieth century the independence of music from words and movement is well established. Consequently we tend to think of music, drama and dance as separate arts. The history of sung theatre itself reveals a friction between words and music that the performer still encounters when doing justice to both librettist and composer or even stage director and musical director. The specialisation of music and spoken drama as separate art forms seems to have been part of the development already underway in ancient Greece. It was in the Middle Ages, however, that music was really to develop as a language with its own laws of structure and syntax. The intellectual pursuit of music as mathematical ratios related to sounds gave rise to a system of notation which could exist independently of the word. Inevitably, the polarity between word and music grew as music developed autonomously as an expressive form. From these developments to the present day the dynamic tension between word and music has fuelled innovation and debate. With reference to medieval music, Richard H. Hoppin states:

It is pertinent to note, first of all, that vocal music of any sort must reconcile two essentially irreconcilable demands: for straightforward and comprehensible presentation of the words, and for purely musical interest and attractiveness. One might write the entire history of vocal music in terms of the varied responses to these conflicting demands. Plain chant itself, despite its rather limited scope, illustrates the extremes that result from yielding to one demand or the other. In addition, we can observe an almost infinite gradation of inter-mediate compromises. The conflicting demands of text and music are responsible, at least in part, for the fundamental division of all plain chant into two stylistic categories: liturgical recitative and free composition.(Hoppin 1978:78)

In place of ‘liturgical recitative’ and ‘free composition' in plain chant one could easily substitute the words ‘recitative’ and ‘aria’ in opera or ‘verse’ and ‘refrain’ in the musical.

Centuries later the voice was being explored as a musical instrument in itself. Composers and performers were preoccupied with pushing back the boundaries of vocal expression to create music that matched the pre-eminent expressive power of language. This was then placed within the context of theatre. Instead of simply organising music to fit the rhythmic pattern of poetic speech (recitative), composers wrote music which deviated from the rhythms of natural speech. These deviations were either contractions or expansions of natural speech patterns or ignored these patterns totally, exploiting the newfound capacity of music to organise words. This opened up space to express feeling in a structure where the narrative action of the story effectively stopped (aria). Many of the challenges you will encounter in singing and acting today result from the diverse ways in which artists have developed these initial experiments and exploited the balance and tension in the marriage of music and word, speech and sound. These represent two poles of our communication needs as human beings: the intuitive, instinctive world of abstract expression based on emotion and arousal which music explores so well, and the rational, analytical world of concrete expression based on definition that has become the preserve of the spoken word. T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part One Introduction
• Part Two The Exercises
• Appendix: Figures 1–28
• Bibliography
• Index of games and exercises by title and destination