In 2004, I was a speaker at the Classical Singers convention. CJ, the editor of this fabulous magazine, asked me to write an article. This was the 1st article I ever wrote for Classical Singer. [edited]
When I use the phrase ‘trained monkey’ in Part 1 of this article, I say it with enormous love. We are creatures worthy of admiration, Oscar Wilde wrote in his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, of the actress, Sybil Vane:
“To spiritualize one’s age – that is something worth doing. If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness, and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world.”
We are not only our voice or our talent or our skills – we are human beings first, and performers second. I have seen that distinction so often blurred. Our talent is just one facet of our total being.
Just how important are we as singers?
I thought I had perspective, that I didn’t define myself by my job. I was wrong. If you are in the middle of the desert and your car breaks down, do you need an opera singer or a mechanic? If you are sick, do you need a doctor or an opera singer? We all have gifts. We all have specialties, but they are just that: gifts and specialties, not the essence of who we are. Cyrano de Bergerac says it all in five words, “My finery’s in the heart.”
Something that has helped me put all of this in perspective was coaching. Singers think of coaching in terms of voice only, but life coaching gives balance to the performer who resides within the human being. It can provide a perspective that gazing at your own image does not. A coach is a collaborative partner who enlarges our possibilities for designing the life you desire, while focusing our vision and our energy on achieving it.
Coaching can illuminate our needs, the values that drive us and help identify what we’re tolerating in our lives. Sounds simple, yes? No. It is profound.
I discovered I never paid attention to my needs, and thought I knew all about my values. Eliminate tolerations? What are tolerations anyway?
I was so fascinated by my personal discoveries, that I decided to become a life coach. I found invaluable tools for opening my eyes to my true purpose and to reconnect to my essential self, not the shell of the opera singer that protected my soft underbelly.
I found that if we ignore our needs, they become a powerful force that control our lives. We respond to subliminal promptings that motivate us to do things that scatter our energy and divert us from our desired destination.
We are extremely fortunate as artists to be paid for dragging out our dark side into the arena of live theater. We can reach deep into our psyches and create a totally charismatic, light-filled character, one we might be afraid to reveal in real life.
Acting is pulling fragments from our inmost selves and exposing them to a spotlight.. We give audiences pieces of our own lives to explore in the safety of a darkened theater. This is artistic psychotherapy – and it can be had for the price of admission. We get to scream our rage, our love and our fear – albeit beautifully. It is a privilege to be on stage.
An artist deals with the vast palette of real human emotions, but the world within the proscenium is not real. It is an illusion. It is in our real life that we must examine the ‘undertoad.’ That is how we grow. That is how we feed the font from which our creativity flows.
When we have a strong personal foundation, we are not swayed by what others think of us, or our voices, or our looks. We are in constant competition, but only with ourselves to be the best we can be. We leave fashion behind and develop personal style. If we are balanced and cultivate and nourish our mind, body and spirit, the sensitive artist’s nature has a safe place to grow and expand.
If we stop learning, and seeking and growing as people, we may as well try to stop time, take the bananas and tip our tasseled hats.
I, for one, refuse.