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Dave: Okay. I'm willing to trust we're getting to something practical I guess. I'm not much on meditation though.
Roger: It's just a matter of trying to join acute body awareness and psychological awareness. Sit still long enough and that can happen pretty naturally. I don't advise it for singers of actors for bigtime mystical reasons, it just allows you to go there, into emotionally sensitive areas a bit at the time over a long period. It's optional, but it can't hurt, believe me.
Dave: I've tried meditation and I just can't do it well. My mind's all over the place. It's impossible.
Roger: That's everyone when they start meditation. And that's fine. You're exercising muscles, muscles of attention, that you haven't used in a long while. So it doesn't go so well at first. You have to wait for patience. You can't have it right away. Could be that's why they call it patience.
Dave: All right, I'll try meditation. I have a group I can go to.
Roger: Okay, get started, we can talk about that much later on. If it's any comfort you'll probably find the talk, and the science, physics, and physiology even more excruciating.
Dave: Great. But Diane was talking about your training people outdoors, and special body postures for singing and stuff. That's more what I came looking for.
Roger: All that's part of what I teach, but there are specific reasons for each exercise. They're each steps toward getting your honest feelings from you to your audience. You have to understand what each exercise is supposed to accomplish or you won't force yourself to let it work, you won't get there.
Dave: That's all I want. To project those feelings.
Roger: But you can't give what you're subtly repressing. And we all do that, almost all the time. Humans are extremely good at reading emotions from voice, we can get a hell of lot of information about what's going on inside Billie Holiday just by listening. Way more information than a hell of a lot of people want. They don't want to hurt with her.
Dave: I don't want to half the time. Only half though.
Roger: But because humans are so good at picking up that stuff - I have a whole explanation as to the mechanics of how that actually works - but because humans are so good at reading that stuff, we've also become, over countless generations, awfully good at repressing it too. We don't want our innermost thoughts showing up constantly in our voice, to just anybody. We'd get fired from our jobs quick, for one thing.
Dave: Or our relationships. I've had relationships with "non-repressers". Christ.
Roger: So, I think repression is perfectly natural. It's happening nearly a hundred percent of the time. But of course it really screws up singing and acting. As art, they go straight to hell.
Dave: With the boy bands.
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