We hosted a guest voice class from one of our most prominent and successful alumni the other day, Jane Archibald (check her out! janearchibald.com), and she provided our students with some wonderful insights and ideas for them to ponder, incorporate and practice. It’s been a while since we had an outside guest work with our singers, and as always, the conversations such a visit provokes can be fraught. It’s tempting for students to want to take on every new tool, to question everything they’ve done previously and feel somewhat (or a lot!) confused by information that might feel as though it is in conflict with what they have heretofore experienced. So, as always, there are some days of working with students to integrate the new information, translate anything they have misinterpreted, and help them to figure out what is immediately useful and what either needs to wait and/or be left aside for now.
Artists are–as a general rule–a self-doubting bunch, and they also look to the experts to provide them with ready solutions for the myriad challenges they face. Naturally each experienced, professional artist they encounter will have plenty of inputs to offer them, and they need to learn (as one does, with time and artistic maturity) that not everything is applicable to them, nor does it necessarily contradict everything they have learned up until now. The desire to ascribe almost sacred truth to anything they hear from a visiting artist (as valuable as it is!) is addictive. Oh, how we long to possess the answer to all of our problems, the ready solution, the magic bullet! The siren call of the panacea encourages us to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, thinking we didn’t know anything before and have just received the treasured information we have sought.
But: the baby is the foundation, the basis, the core of our knowledge, which will grow and evolve with time, age and experience. This baby’s bathwater will be changed many, many times over the cycle of an artistic life, and we must learn to accept that who we are at our very centre is valuable, and the details that surround it are not to be confused with the legitimacy and centrality of the baby itself. We need to honour who we are, the learnings we have gleaned and embodied, and be willing to challenge them and allow them to evolve at every turn. The baby is not the bathwater. Keep the baby! Change the bathwater as needed.