As someone working with her own voice now for about 50 years, and with the voices of others for half that time, I’ve come—gratefully—to know and greet the Inner Animal. In my own personal journey, it took me a very long time to recognize that this wild spirit could be connected to the part of me that sang for a living. In the work I did with others, I believe I intuited it early on and integrated it in my work with students, but didn’t connect the dots until sometime in the last ten years.
My final “official” year of teaching is well underway, and the epiphanies abound. Every new (or repeated!) realization is all the more poignant. I notice again and again the power of working with the voice and what it can awaken in individuals and collectives. The witnessing of someone opening to their own power and allowing themselves to channel it is awe-inspiring. How often did it happen over the years that a singer stood before me, making a noise they had never made before and looking astonished? Again and again, when they asked “what was THAT?!?”, I would say something like: “that was YOU. Your real voice”. I might have said, meet Your Inner Animal.
Very recently, I had the occasion to accompany a Masters student along their artistic path. We were working only peripherally on the voice; really our work was investigating embodiment of “extended techniques” (basically, sounds that are outside of the typical classical singing sounds, like wails, cries, growls, grunts, whistles and clicks) as part of classical contemporary music, and how one might successfully bring such works to the stage in a coherent way. Interestingly (and probably not coincidentally), the songs that they chose to work on all related to animal sounds: loons, whales, raccoons. And one of the pieces, we came to realize, was connected to the Human Animal, or perhaps more specifically, the Woman Animal. The deeper we went in this work, the more we recognized that the connection to the physical body and its intuitive, animalistic actions was integral to free singing, or as the student began to call it, “noise acting”. The moment we called it “singing”, the body began to stiffen, rigidity and disconnection ensued.
This seizing up to an instruction to “sing” is all too familiar to me, both as practicing artist and voice instructor. What emerged powerfully for this “noise actor” in particular was that it was through the body, the movement (especially ‘animalistic’ movement), that the free voice held sway. Although I will say that I have seen this more often in women I work with, I note, too, that there have been many men who have been (and felt) encaged in their bodies, rigid with expectation, detached from their feelings and disconnected generally. When we imitate animals (sidebar: “animals are beautiful people”, I noted down on November 5, 2020, mid-pandemic!), when we channel our innermost expression of feeling through the body and its movements, we can make fully integrated, powerful sounds. We connect to our truest selves.