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Roger: Right, as Stanislavsky writes in his first book I think, nothing's easier than bad acting. It's natural for humans. Well, I think something like that's true for singing, too. The important thing to realize is that you're not trying to add anything, or force feelings into your voice, it's all there right now, but our usual way is to prevent all that from being visible, too.
Dave: So I have to fight nature.
Roger: In a way. Not violently, but you have to discover her tricks, and give yourself a chance to get around them, or coax her out of them. You don't want to be warlike about it - what you're trying to get around, always, are parts of your own psychological defenses, and they're there for a reason you don't want to destroy them, it's more like suspending them or even accepting them.
Dave: But wait a minute. Feeling is natural. When I listen to a bad singer, it's bad, it's wooden. It's not natural.
Roger: Natural's a big word. Sometimes we mean, how we'd be without culture, without editing ourself for other people - a natural laugh, say.
Dave: That's more where I'm going.
Roger: But you also live in a society, with a girlfriend or wife probably. You may not want to send up a big red flag every time she doesn't something that mildly irritates you.
Dave: (laughs)
Roger: We all live with a whole lot of people we can't mortally offend. We have for endless generations. It's natural to want to be private, even a bit artificial some of the time. Not to let everyone know everything we're feeling, or could be feeling, every second. We do it without thinking, it's second nature to us. If we didn't, we wouldn't get allow very well, but training people to act would be easy, you really wouldn't have to train them at all. And everybody who wanted to become a dynamite actor, or jazz singer, could.
Dave: So what's so hard?
Roger: To some extent, the same thing that's hard in holding your breath until you pass out. Nature really doesn't want you to piss off your tribe members too soften. Or to reveal everything you know to them.
Dave: This makes nature the enemy. I don't believe that.
Roger: Nature wants to help. It wants you to survive and reproduce. If editing what you say, and what feelings other people can detect in you can help you, that's what nature wants to do for you.
Dave: Man, no offense, but this is a lot of talk, the impression I got from Diane was that you'd fix me up with some simple advances, like better stance for singing and then I could pop out as a real singer.
Roger: I've learned over the last couple of years that the results I get from just revealing the mechanical techniques and letting people go from there can be temporary, or limited, unless there's a lot of talk first to tell students exactly why they're doing things. What they're supposed to get out of it, and why.
Dave: I can't see going back to a worse or less expressive voice if I ever got there.
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