8. Epilogue
Finding a character is a useful way to give focus to the text your singing, to keep the song interesting and new for yourself and therefore for the audience. Still, many singers have difficulty from going back from acting out a piece to recital (or worse: audition) mode. There are other theatrical ways to get more comfortable with the stage in any performance. Currently, I am exploring how this works with singing, together with two acting coaches and three other singers. In this way of being on stage, you don’t start from being a character, but you start from being yourself. You find out what all the fixed beliefs are that you have about a certain role or poem and try to overcome them with simple actions.
Here we experimented also with the song ‘I’m Nobody’ of Lori Laitman again. There is me peeling potatoes, while my friend Julia plays a frog on a big bouncing ball. There are no characters and it makes no sense, but it triggered genuine reactions in me in a way that I got really annoyed by her. Who knows where this leads to, but it all comes down to this:
Do not get stuck in your own fixed opinions on a text or a song.
