While singing can in fact sound pretty, it often doesn’t look pretty. To attain a really full sound, one has to open up that jaw much wider than your average American normally feels comfortable doing. Teeth become exposed. Saliva occasionally spews. Faces grow red and sweaty. Bodies contort. And I’m talking about the audience.
Throughout my Dad’s choral concert my sister swayed and nodded perceptibly, channeling spirituals and madrigals alike. She dances with a professional modern dance troupe in town and has danced off and on since childhood. Her body hears music and dances, even when she’s not aware of it—she literally can’t help herself but to move to the music. It reminds me a little of how I rock all the time, even when I’m not holding a kid.
I also used to experience a Subconscious Kinesthetic Audience Response (yes, you may call it SKARe for short), back when I was a musical theater chick. Mid-way through watching someone else’s’ performance I’d find my mouth wide-open and my rib cage expanding and contracting along. I pity the people sitting next to me. Oops. Excuse me. Casually returning face to pleasant-concert-viewing mode now. Closing mouth. Lowering startled-looking eyebrows. Relaxing posture-perfect back into chair. Thhhere ya go. Easy does it, Ms. Ingénue.
Autopilot body reactions comprise only part of the audience experience. How about cognizant audience participation? I’m talking about clapping. Not as in applause, as in along-with-the-music. Did that mortify anyone else as a child? Finding yourself surrounded by adults gleefully clapping along to some down home family-friendly tunes? Almost as bad as watching adults dance. Perhaps that’s the mark of adulthood. Now I’ll clap along, beaming and singing if invited. Often I even get a little choked up. The vulnerability of it all—the opening of mouths and minds and hearts, the momentary shedding of public persona–that’s pretty.
I love singing. I’m going to make a CD. Meditational, mantra, peaceful kinda stuff.
Want one?
:))
xx
I know this of what you speak of. I just went to my son’s orchestra concert last night and had to remember to keep my head from bobbing. He tells me that I resemble the bobble heads.
I think its awesome to get into a performance or a song – but now I go beyond that and ask, who invented clapping? Was someone just sitting around one day and decided to see what it would be like to take their hands and make them come together so that it makes a noise??
This is my mind. HELP!!!
Great post made me smile!!!
I look like a total spaz when I try to participate as well. Especially during Skaraoke
I may be a tad bit more reserved. . . I always feel like a fool and wish I could let go a little more.
I remember taking my daughter to see Dance Kalidoscope and had tears running down my cheeks. It was that moving.
My daughter was mortified and moved down a seat so she wouldn’t be next to me.
I choose to Participate Out Loud! I clap, sing along and do all of those things.
And since no one invites me to their performances nowadays, I do it at home to the DVD they send me of their big day.
I took my daughter and her friend to Lilth Faire some years ago for her birthday. The Dixie Chiks were performing. I was singing alng. The couple in front of me moved down 3 seats.
So I have NO IDEA where my 2 girls got their fabulous voicces. It sure as hell wasn’t from me!
Letting go is always very embarrassing, but I can’t help it. Of course, my kids are always mortified, but isn’t that my job?
I think you know where I stand on all of this…. 🙂 I’m always participating from my seat AND choking up with emotion over the beauty and vulnerability of it all. I never fail to wipe away a few tears during my little ones’ school plays. Fortunately, they are not quite old enough to be completely mortified by me. Not yet, anyway!
I find myself doing this while watching movies. I catch myself mimicing expressions. AND I see my oldest son do this all the time. Maybe I missed my calling as a theater chick in high school… Note to self: get Oliver involved in children’s theater as soon as he can speak in full sentences.
Guilty! I participate: I clap, I sing, I smile, I get choked up.
I’m a full-on freak where creativity and expression is involved!
Pearl
I can’t help moving when I hear great music. It’s like having Tourette’s, only more visually unappealing.
I love singing too . . . it’s just that people usually RUN when I do it.
Kate has this “song” she makes me play in the car everyday. It’s a song I often sing along to … which obviously also includes the associated tourette’s like body movements. The other day, she told me it wasn’t my turn to sing, but hers. So, I stopped singing.
From the backseat she yells at me to stop singing. I told her I DID! Then she says, “No, you are still doing this …” as she’s bobbing her head side to side.
So, apparently this association is evident at 3?
I do that some time…when I’m in the car…I imagine I’m that person…and then I see a cop in the next lane watching me…
I can’t even blame my background (not musical)- but I move to music all the time.
I also rock like a am holding a kid a lot these days, even when I’m not.
I usually find myself trying to participate, but with zero rythm (even after yeeears of dance lessons) and a voice like a rusty harmonica, my son, at three, has already asked me to stop.
I, too, can’t help it…I have to get all up in the music.
Anywhere.
I use restraint when I am around my daughter because it mortifies her.
Kate! I do that same thing at movies!
Peace -Rene
Seven CDs later, there are still songs I perform that build up spit and nearly choke me. Sometimes I wish I could have one of those dentist’s suction thingies on hand…
I love it when the crowd sings along, claps, dances, joins in. Then, when I mess up (and I WILL mess up), maybe they won’t notice. Also? It shows me they’re into the concert, and that’s a nice feeling – and that feeling of being part of something more, something greater than a band on stage, part of an entire village of sound and spirit rising up and bringing the dance to the stars is much to be desired.
Shade and Sweetwater,
K (who would be right next to you, mouthing the words, swaying, and clapping)
Oh man, I get all choked up all the time at performances, or just when Joy to the World starts playing at Christmas mass. (I hope you don’t mind a Catholic posting here.) Little Drummer Boy? I’m a goner. That YouTube video of the train station where everyone starts dancing to Do-Re-Mi? Sobbed my way through it.
But even better than watching it, is being in the thick of it, am I right? There is nothing better than singing or dancing with a group of people. I left it for a long time and then went back, and wow! It’s even better than I remember it. Probably because I have less ego involved — a little less anyway.
Have you ever watched Cecilia Bartoli sing? Man, does she make a meal of it. And those crazy eyes. But the voice that comes out of the wacky performance!
I loved what you said about the vulnerability and the shedding of persona. It really is so beautiful.
Beautiful music crosses all boundaries and unifies us all. What a gift!
Unfortunately, though I participate in the unity, I look like a buffoon.
I spent a lot of time teaching my children how to be embarrassing, and I did a good job. I embarrassed them really well, and now they’re happily embarrassing their own children. I think it’s actually hereditary.
But it’s also human to sway and sing to music. I think music is such a natural extension of humanity, we can’t help get into it and see and feel the beauty of it.
How funny! My children like singing and clapping and dancing so they have not yet learnt to be mortified! But roll on those teen age years…
I just sit there with my mouth hanging open. I’m okay with it now but in elementary school, I was not maybe it was b/c ten people pointed it out to me during one play
I have found alcohol helps me move to the groove.