Warm Up

Do you ever notice during sporting events that the athletes always take time to stretch their muscles, loosen their joints, and prepare themselves for their performance?  Runners always do leg stretches and then shake their legs prior to getting into the starting block.  Baseball batters swing bats with weights on them and then swing the bat back and forth overhead to loosen up the shoulders and arms.  Swimmers roll their shoulders, hips, and head around prior to getting onto the starting platform.

The reason these athletes do this is that although our memories work very well at reminding us what we are doing, our individual muscles do not have memory banks attached to them.  Our biological systems require that we remind our muscles what we are about to do.  We must remind the legs how to move quickly in a back and forth manner.  We must remind the arms how to swing the lumber in a smooth and powerful arc.  We must remind the shoulders and hips how to move through the water in a way that will propel us as quickly as possible.

Athletes are not the only people required to do these bits of body reminding.  As a stage performer, you use your entire body to portray a story to the audience. Harrison Ford states it succinctly in saying, "We are assistant story tellers."  Talking through your lines in the order they appear in the script is not enough to portray that story to the audience.  There are inflections in the voice that are required to inform the audience how your character feels about what he/she is saying.  There are body movements that your character goes through in relationship to the story being portrayed.  There are facial gestures and head directions that your character will need to do to tell his or her part of the story.

Like the athlete, you will need to remind your body, including your mouth and vocal chords, how to go through these motions.

Vocal chords that are not warmed up and regularly practiced are parts of your body just ripe for an injury as devastating as any pulled ligament or muscle in your leg or arm.  Your vocal cords are small pieces of flesh smaller than the skin that flows as part of the webbing from your thumb to your forefinger.  To create the pitches that you will be singing or speaking, these "pieces of flesh" will need to vibrate anywhere from 80 to 1760 times per second, or faster if you are a talented soprano.  (Try and move any other part of your body that fast!)

A good vocal warm up will include very gentle open vowel singing with the mouth broad and open.  Women should practice and warm up their head voices and men should use, practice, and warm up their falsettos.  Allow the vocal chords to wake up slowly.

Following this, I recommend several different mouth and facial warm ups plus breathing exercises along with the singing.  Your vocal chords do not do all the work.  If you do not support your sound with air, your vocal chords will not be able to vibrate and your head will not be able to produce any resonance to your sound.  Warm ups should help you project your sound.  The mouth and its shape will change the tone and depth of the sound.

At this point, I also strongly recommend warming up your ears.  Sing choral sections from the production that involve close harmony.  I use some pre-prepared choral warm ups in every routine I lead.  You need to remind your ears what good quality choral harmony will sound like so that it can be reproduced during the performance.

On this point, do not forget to breath.  The abdominal muscle is the single most powerful muscle in the body.  It attaches to your lower ribs and its motion up and down and out is what allows you to breath.  If your abdominal muscle is moving correctly, your should be able to put your hands on your waist just above your hips and feel it expand forward, outward left and right, and back below your lower ribs.  Warming up this procedure will help you to project while avoiding that light-headed feeling you get when you breathe deeply and suddenly.

When warming up the face, move your mouth, jaw, cheeks, and eyes.  Allow your face to get use to the idea of grand motions that can be seen from the stage by every person in every seat in the audience.

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