seems that the theme for my day is love--that's what martha meyer's masterclass was "about," and the memorial celebration for stephanie reinhart, one of the directors and visionaries of adf who died earlier this year from cancer, was definitely "about" love. shaping yourself towards/into/within the people and world around you. touching, listening, and responding to the world inside and outside of yourself, with your flesh, eyes, mind, and voice. some people make these actions appear like such a simple and easy way to live, with pleasure, ease, graciousness, and vitality that everyone around them feels. martha meyers, and it seems stephanie reinhart, exude these qualities. in her class martha implied that you simply decide, and in each moment make another decision, and another decision, take a step and renew, change directions and begin again, turn your head, see, and share, take a breath and feel your lungs, sit and listen to another person speak, and on and on. one thing charles reinhart said--every once in awhile, at least four times a year, look in the mirror and see it as a frame of your mortality, and let that help you decide what is most important for you to do, to care about, to desire.
speaking of repeating what i've heard other people say--in voice and gesture class we were working on 'metal' voices, when the sound is coming from the nasal cavaties and behind the eyes and forehead, and ellen taught us part of this bulgarian song. that vocal sound is the traditional way of singing there, more forward in the head and direct in the tone, whereas the tone in the classical singing i was taught is made farther back, is more rounded--i'll have to explore all this more though because i'm just starting to understand how to switch between them--there's also a really deep tone coming from support in the pelvic floor that i never explored in classical training. this all reminded me about the bulgarian village music cd i copied. i just started trying to learn some of those songs by writing down the sounds of the syllables and listening to the voices of the women on the recordings. they're really satisfying songs to sing. sometime i'll have to ask marina what the words mean.
posted by Liza 28.6.03