Bringing Yourself to Opera

Expanding your sense of yourself is one of the most invaluable things that you can do as an artist.

Because opera can be such an egoic art form, many singers tend to find the elements of performance that put them on display, playing to what they think the audience WANTS to see and hear, and trading in their own unique artistic voices for an easily constructed imitation.

Our souls are mysterious, infinite, and wondrous. We always believe that we have a sense of who we are - but do we REALLY know who we are? We hold onto cliched images of ourselves that never reveal the true nature and depth of who we are.

Can we be RUTHLESSLY honest with ourselves? When are we greedy, bossy, fearful, silly, hateful, spiteful? When I'm dealing with a rude salesperson, I can take offense, my ego can rise in me (despite myself) and I can find myself becoming aggressive, rude, and indignant in return.

You can't let anything idiosyncratic pass you by! All the delicious neuroses, impulses, fears, and stupidities are what make you WHO YOU ARE and they also create the characters that you will portray.

The basic components of the characters we will play are somewhere within ourselves. There are hundreds of people within you that will surface throughout the course of a single day. You change your sense of self a hundred times a day as you are influenced by circumstances, your relationship to others, the nature of the event, and your clothing.

This self-discovery will NEVER cease and it will take a long time to put into practice consistently.

Watching others can be helpful to you if it assists you to identify HOW YOU BEHAVE. But to look OUTSIDE YOURSELF for an imitation of someone else is as dangerous as copying someone else's vocal sound or style.

Hagen's THIRD exercise is a terrific way to learn more about yourself and the things that propel and source your behavior. You'll be able to quickly delve into different aspects of yourself. You'll also discover how you treat people depending on who they are, your past with them, how they're treating you, what you want from them and what else is going on in your life. It will also give you insight into your relationships and teach you that NO RELATIONSHIP is in stasis.

In the exercise, you make or receive three separate phone calls from three separate people. Make sure to select three people that cause your behavior to change when they interact with you. The circumstances that you select should be unrelated to the phone calls themselves. You can set it up like the FIRST exercise, but you just happen to make/receive calls. Just be sure that the calls change your behavior and NOT the circumstances that you find yourself.

This exercises should last for 3 minutes. Make sure to keep to it, to keep your selections fresh and to the point.

You could be calling your sister to tell her good news about getting cast in an opera but her 5-year-old little girl picks up the phone, then a telemarketer interrupts your call to inform you that your credit card bill is 90 days overdue and they are going to send you to collections. After that, your boyfriend/girlfriend calls to ask you to go to the movies.

Each of these calls will elicit different behavior. Do this exercise many times with many different people on the other end to learn about yourself and to build a warehouse of transferences to use for future productions.

You can apply this exercise to your aria/scene work by putting up the Fourth Side before you begin work on it. Know who you are singing to in the aria and see how your behavior is affected by that other person. Make them as specific to you as the current relationships you have in your own life.