LJ Idol Week #17 - Topic "Just Breath"
This is my entry for week #17 of therealljidol.
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How I Became A Demon
In 1989, I auditioned for a jingju production. Jingju (Chinese for "Capital theatre" - the "Jing" in this word is the same "jing" in the word "Beijing") is usually translated as "Beijing opera" or something "Peking opera." This is somewhat akin to referring to hula as "Hawaiian Ballet" or to capoeira as "Brazilian fisticuffs." Singing is an integral skill in jingju, but so is martial arts, stylized movement and plain ol' acting without singing. "Opera" was a name Europeans slapped on it.
Honestly, I'd never even seen a jingju much less performed in one. None-the-less, it was one of the major productions being staged at the University of Hawaii at Manoa that semester so I figured I'd try it out. Maybe I'd play one of the guys who carry spears and stand very still for 30 minutes at a time. I was no singer - standing very still, on the other hand, was something I could do with great aplomb.
The guys who carry spears and other pole arms and stand very, very still in jingju are referred to as longtao, which means "dragon set." It is a cool sounding name to make you feel better about being human scenary. "I appear to be no more important than a chair, but I am actually a dragon."
I was auditioning in front of three master teachers from the Jiangsu Province Jingju Company. When I got up on stage, I did a little bit of the mining monologue from Beyond the Fringe, sang a section of "The Mandalay Song" from Brecht and Weill's Happy End and did a bit of an improvised scene. While the Americans in attendance all seemed at least amused, the master teachers (who, I learned later, spoke not a word of English) watched impassively. All good - my dream of playing breathing wallpaper was all but assured.
Then I was asked, via translator, to make a sound that was a little like Mei Lanfang's singing:
Mei Lanfang was arguably the greatest and most important performer of female (dan) roles in the twentieth century. One of his last students was our lead teacher. I later learned this was as if Enrico Caruso had trained Beverly Sills and she decided she wanted to train a bunch of Hawaii college students. I mean, holy cats.
I did as I was asked with absolutely no knowledge of what I was doing and suddenly all three teachers were nodding excitedly and writing down notes. I shrugged not recognizing the significance of that moment. We seldom notice when fate steps in to transform us.
The next day, I looked at the cast list and discovered that I was cast as the male lead.
Technically double cast, as all of the roles were cast with two separate performers to maximize the number of people who could participate.
I objected to the director that I was singularly unqualified to do this and wouldn't I look great standing behind everyone holding a pole arm. She just smiled and laughed and didn't really respond. My training started that day.
I finally got to play a longtao character in 2002 when an actor dropped from a show two weeks out and they needed somebody who knew how to do the correct jingju character walk and then stand still for thirty minutes while holding an enormous axe. Dreams do come true.
Critics from outside of China have compared the sound of jingju to a cat being slowly strangled in a drawer full of pots and pans. Like all music - indeed, like all art - I believe anyone can acquire a taste for it with regular exposure. Indeed, I've come to think its absolutely lovely and am even a little snobbish about what styles I like.
However as I mentioned, back in 1989 I'd never heard of jingju before much less heard what it sounded like. When they started training me, I was absolutely horrified that we'd be making these sounds in front of other humans and calling it music. The music scale is slightly different from the western music scale so, to my ear, it sounded just a little wrong.
Furthermore the placement of the voice wasn't in the chest (as is the case with most Western style vocal production) but in the head. When sung correctly, there's a rich tone not unlike a bird song. When sung poorly, it sounds more like a high pitched version of the most annoying sound in the world from Dumb and Dumber. As you can imagine, a room full of rank beginners trying to find the correct vocal placement for jingju is a particularly hellish soundscape.
Finding the correct vocal placement is hard (you want to aim for the back of your hard palate and then push the sound through your entire head) but the real challenge to producing the correct voice has to do with breath control. Even though you're aiming to make your head resonate like a struck bell, you have to inhale deeply into the lower part of your lungs (below your rib cage) and then carefully control your diaphragm to turn your breath into a powerful, focused stream of sound. As my teacher used to say (via translator), "if you want to sing up, think down."
I'd never had any formal singing training before so all of this was mind blowing to me. I'd been operating a human body for 22 years but had only the vaguest idea about how my voice worked. Something about magical chest elves with powerful bellows, I suspected. After a year of training, I went from being unable to identify my diaphragm to having a strong, precise muscle. I could hold a note for like 90 seconds - not really that long but mind blowing for me.
If I remembered to breath, that is.
In the summer of 1991, we were invited to perform our production in Shanghai, Nanjing and Wuxi. According to the local press, when they saw my green eyes poking through the jingju make-up, they thought I looked like a demon. I was compared favorably and enthusiastically to a well trained monkey. No sarcasm - the local Chinese press reacted to me in much the same way we do when we see Koko the gorilla interact with a kitten. I was adorable, if un-evolved.
When I first took the stage in Shanghai, things were going great at first, but in the middle of one of my longer sung pieces, I started losing consciousness. I fought to stay awake as everything started going black. "Just finish the song," I thought. I did. There was applause. I walked off stage and collapsed.
I was only on the ground for a moment before I started feeling better. As the dressers helped me to my feet, one of my three master teachers was there and he was laughing at me. Through the translator, he told me "you sang that whole piece in a single breath. That's not so good for you. You'll pass out."
I've learned my lesson. Any time I have to speak or sing in public, I'll spend a few moments just focusing on my breathing before going on stage. When I get on stage, I make a point to always take a full breath of air before making a sound.
My singing sounds less like a cat being strangled these days (and more like a live fox being roasted inside a large pipe). I'm not always as on pitch as I'd like to be. But, gosh darn it, I'm able to sing long and loud because I learned to breath.
---
How I Became A Demon
In 1989, I auditioned for a jingju production. Jingju (Chinese for "Capital theatre" - the "Jing" in this word is the same "jing" in the word "Beijing") is usually translated as "Beijing opera" or something "Peking opera." This is somewhat akin to referring to hula as "Hawaiian Ballet" or to capoeira as "Brazilian fisticuffs." Singing is an integral skill in jingju, but so is martial arts, stylized movement and plain ol' acting without singing. "Opera" was a name Europeans slapped on it.
Honestly, I'd never even seen a jingju much less performed in one. None-the-less, it was one of the major productions being staged at the University of Hawaii at Manoa that semester so I figured I'd try it out. Maybe I'd play one of the guys who carry spears and stand very still for 30 minutes at a time. I was no singer - standing very still, on the other hand, was something I could do with great aplomb.
The guys who carry spears and other pole arms and stand very, very still in jingju are referred to as longtao, which means "dragon set." It is a cool sounding name to make you feel better about being human scenary. "I appear to be no more important than a chair, but I am actually a dragon."
I was auditioning in front of three master teachers from the Jiangsu Province Jingju Company. When I got up on stage, I did a little bit of the mining monologue from Beyond the Fringe, sang a section of "The Mandalay Song" from Brecht and Weill's Happy End and did a bit of an improvised scene. While the Americans in attendance all seemed at least amused, the master teachers (who, I learned later, spoke not a word of English) watched impassively. All good - my dream of playing breathing wallpaper was all but assured.
Then I was asked, via translator, to make a sound that was a little like Mei Lanfang's singing:
Click to viewMei Lanfang was arguably the greatest and most important performer of female (dan) roles in the twentieth century. One of his last students was our lead teacher. I later learned this was as if Enrico Caruso had trained Beverly Sills and she decided she wanted to train a bunch of Hawaii college students. I mean, holy cats.
I did as I was asked with absolutely no knowledge of what I was doing and suddenly all three teachers were nodding excitedly and writing down notes. I shrugged not recognizing the significance of that moment. We seldom notice when fate steps in to transform us.
The next day, I looked at the cast list and discovered that I was cast as the male lead.
Technically double cast, as all of the roles were cast with two separate performers to maximize the number of people who could participate.
I objected to the director that I was singularly unqualified to do this and wouldn't I look great standing behind everyone holding a pole arm. She just smiled and laughed and didn't really respond. My training started that day.
I finally got to play a longtao character in 2002 when an actor dropped from a show two weeks out and they needed somebody who knew how to do the correct jingju character walk and then stand still for thirty minutes while holding an enormous axe. Dreams do come true.
Critics from outside of China have compared the sound of jingju to a cat being slowly strangled in a drawer full of pots and pans. Like all music - indeed, like all art - I believe anyone can acquire a taste for it with regular exposure. Indeed, I've come to think its absolutely lovely and am even a little snobbish about what styles I like.
However as I mentioned, back in 1989 I'd never heard of jingju before much less heard what it sounded like. When they started training me, I was absolutely horrified that we'd be making these sounds in front of other humans and calling it music. The music scale is slightly different from the western music scale so, to my ear, it sounded just a little wrong.
Furthermore the placement of the voice wasn't in the chest (as is the case with most Western style vocal production) but in the head. When sung correctly, there's a rich tone not unlike a bird song. When sung poorly, it sounds more like a high pitched version of the most annoying sound in the world from Dumb and Dumber. As you can imagine, a room full of rank beginners trying to find the correct vocal placement for jingju is a particularly hellish soundscape.
Finding the correct vocal placement is hard (you want to aim for the back of your hard palate and then push the sound through your entire head) but the real challenge to producing the correct voice has to do with breath control. Even though you're aiming to make your head resonate like a struck bell, you have to inhale deeply into the lower part of your lungs (below your rib cage) and then carefully control your diaphragm to turn your breath into a powerful, focused stream of sound. As my teacher used to say (via translator), "if you want to sing up, think down."
I'd never had any formal singing training before so all of this was mind blowing to me. I'd been operating a human body for 22 years but had only the vaguest idea about how my voice worked. Something about magical chest elves with powerful bellows, I suspected. After a year of training, I went from being unable to identify my diaphragm to having a strong, precise muscle. I could hold a note for like 90 seconds - not really that long but mind blowing for me.
If I remembered to breath, that is.
In the summer of 1991, we were invited to perform our production in Shanghai, Nanjing and Wuxi. According to the local press, when they saw my green eyes poking through the jingju make-up, they thought I looked like a demon. I was compared favorably and enthusiastically to a well trained monkey. No sarcasm - the local Chinese press reacted to me in much the same way we do when we see Koko the gorilla interact with a kitten. I was adorable, if un-evolved.
When I first took the stage in Shanghai, things were going great at first, but in the middle of one of my longer sung pieces, I started losing consciousness. I fought to stay awake as everything started going black. "Just finish the song," I thought. I did. There was applause. I walked off stage and collapsed.
I was only on the ground for a moment before I started feeling better. As the dressers helped me to my feet, one of my three master teachers was there and he was laughing at me. Through the translator, he told me "you sang that whole piece in a single breath. That's not so good for you. You'll pass out."
I've learned my lesson. Any time I have to speak or sing in public, I'll spend a few moments just focusing on my breathing before going on stage. When I get on stage, I make a point to always take a full breath of air before making a sound.
My singing sounds less like a cat being strangled these days (and more like a live fox being roasted inside a large pipe). I'm not always as on pitch as I'd like to be. But, gosh darn it, I'm able to sing long and loud because I learned to breath.