Читать книгу Singing For Dummies - Pamelia S. Phillips - Страница 46

Maintaining your posture while you walk makes a big difference in your appearance and your ability to sing while walking or moving. You may actually have to sing while walking around the stage. Church choirs sing as they process, and backup singers groove to the music as they dance. What if you have to cross the stage? You want to look glorious for the entire time that you’re walking onstage and when you land in place to sing.

To maintain your posture while walking, keep your eyes up and look ahead as you walk. You can still see where you’re going even if you’re not looking at the ground. You also want to be able to land in correct alignment. When you have to walk onto the stage for a performance, you want to land in alignment so you don’t have to adjust your position.

Practice finding your alignment when you’re standing still. Then walk a few steps and land in place. Did you land in the same alignment? Look down at your feet to see whether they’re parallel and the same distance as your hipbones. If not, try again: Walk around and then land in alignment. Eventually, you’ll confidently land in alignment and know that your body is ready for some fabulous singing.

You also want to practice walking with an awareness of the weight and pressure on your legs. You want to feel the sensation that your weight is evenly distributed on your legs and feet and have a sense of buoyancy. Feeling your weight sink into your legs makes you feel much heavier. Pushing into the floor or pavement causes you to feel pressure and tension in your legs. Of course, you want to connect your feet to the floor, but you want to feel an opening sensation, as if your feet touching the floor causes your legs and muscles to open — not contract and tense. Try walking and pushing into the floor, and then walking and visualizing your body with springs that open when your feet connect with the floor.

After practicing walking with ease, you can then practice walking and singing. Allow yourself time to stop and monitor your posture to make sure you’re staying aligned while singing a song. You can also practice without your shoes and feel the connection of your feet to the floor. After you can feel the opening of the feet into the floor when you breathe, you can then compare that sensation with shoes on.

The same applies for dancing and singing. Practice the alignment described in the chapter and then try out some of the breathing exercises in Chapter 4. When you feel confident that you have those skills solid, try combining those skills while singing and dancing. Even if you aren’t a dancer, move around the room while you’re singing to notice the difference between singing with tension and singing with your body aligned and balanced.