I auditioned for a play earlier this week, and after surviving the first cuts, the director said to those of us remaining, “You can all sing, right?” The beautiful young actress to my left immediately replied, “Yes!” I felt my eyes get really wide as I nodded my head mutely and thought, “Please don’t make me sing right now because all I can think of is The Alaska Flag Song and I’m terrified of singing.”
She didn’t make us sing. Crisis averted, at least for now. But Alexander exhorts us to, “…Meet a stimulus that always puts you wrong and learn to deal with it,” not to avoid the stimulus. So the fact remains that I’ll probably have to sing in an audition eventually. I’ve taken a look back at Ron Murdock’s wonderful essay Born to Sing (from the book Curiosity Recaptured, edited by Jerry Sontag, Mornum Time Press), and the passage that inspires me the most discusses singing as springing from a desire to communicate and to express beauty.
This is very different from my view of singing as a struggle, but actually communicating is much harder than it sounds. I’ve been practicing singing and meeting my own eyes in a mirror (as advised by Murdock in his essay), and I found that I’m awfully shy, but little by little it has become easier. The next step will be to sing in front of others and actually look at them instead of at the floor, or off into the space above their heads, which is what I would usually do. Baby steps.
The full text of Murdock’s essay is available here.
