Saber de la experiencia docente

I mentioned earlier (pp.13–14) the four Middendorf practitioners I interviewed who work with voice – Jeff Crockett, Maria Höller, Letizia Fiorenza, and Brigitte Wellner. Crockett (Appendix A), head of voice at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, trained in voice at the Central School for Speech and Drama in London, taught in Minneapolis for a number of years, then resigned to train full-time in the Alexander technique for three years. He began the job in San Francisco straight out of Alexander school.

It was more responsibility than I had been used to, and I was fresh out of Alexander School and ready to, you know, kind of conquer the world with the Alexander technique. And the initial passion and creativity that was in my teaching when I didn’t know much was gone, and something kind of flat came in, and it was really horrid, it was really upsetting (Appendix A, paragraph 8).

Crockett happened upon Middendorf breathwork, took part in some workshops, and realised that this was good work for him:

when I started working with the breathwork I realised that part of what was killing the real essence and life in the work was in the Alexander work we’re really orienting to observation and that’s very different from sensation. In fact in an Alexander lesson they’ll talk to you a lot about, don’t feel it, inhibit and direct. It’s kind of like a little

straightjacket (Appendix A, paragraph 10).

I do not want to suggest that Crockett’s experiences with Alexander work are representative of that field. My point is that for Crockett the orientation to sensation is the real key in working with voice. He uses this with his students, so that in voice work they orient to sensation rather than to sound, to being in sensation rather than to observing something. Again the kinæsthetic is the dominant æsthetic.

More recently Crockett wrote about using the breathwork with his students:

To ‘allow’ the breath is huge for them and has a tremendous impact on the way they can relate the work to their acting. Authenticity comes into the work, spontaneity and creative responses that do not

come out of their heads, but from a richer source within them (Appendix A, postscript, paragraph 4).

This theme – that allowing breath to come and go on its own is vital, and that doing so encourages ‘authenticity’ – is common among Middendorf breathwork practitioners who work with voice, as will become apparent in this section.

‘Authenticity’ is a complex notion within the arts with links to religion and transcendence dating back to Aristotle’s Poetics, as Salim Kemal

and Ivan Gaskell’s Performance and authenticity in the arts (1999)

makes clear. The Middendorf breathwork practitioners I cite in this section use ‘authentic’ to refer to a ‘genuineness’ of self-expression that seems to be connected both with ‘allowing’ – in this case

allowing the inhalation to come on its own – and perceiving sensation – the kinæsthetic dimension that I have just been discussing.

The following report from a research workshop was made by an Alexander practitioner after practising some of the ‘vowel space’ work, using the sounds ‘M’ and ‘I’:

A major insight here. I realise why I’ve always been reluctant to go onto voice, to sound. Because I feel that sounding demands a bigger, an extra effort. So I quickly grab the breath, pull it in and push it out as sound – all unnecessary. By going through the process of establishing perception of the breath cycle, and particularly, by waiting for the breath to come back of its own accord and

contemplating the sound as I observe it (not use it in a utilitarian way) the sound […] is already there and one simply continues it as one allows the breath to go onto the creative moment (HP 23 May 04).

By adulthood many people have developed such breath and voice patterns as HP describes. Middendorf breathwork provides a different possibility, a way of ‘unpatterning’. HP’s background in sensory awareness, including Alexander technique, no doubt contributed to making is possible for him to discover this so quickly, in only the second session he attended.

Maria Höller has developed a body of work she calls Atem Tonus Ton that grew out of her experiences as a Middendorf breathwork

practitioner and her explorations of her own voice. I interviewed her in Männedorf in November 2003 (see Appendix E). She described her work as a search for ‘joyful, authentic performing; to lose the demands for producing a “perfect voice”’ (Appendix E, paragraph 8). She has developed many different exercises based on working with

Gegenspannung, which translates as ‘tension in contrary’. These are

based on the work Ilse Middendorf refers to as spannungsatem

(breath in creative tension). Höller works with resistance, but in a flexible, relaxed way, not by way of great muscular tension. Early on in developing her work she found:

The body should be relaxed in the upper part but we need the

strength from the lower part. So it’s important to have a good posture. Tension against the earth, which gives the power of resistance, is okay, but against the heaven, means probably a pressure for the vocal cords (Appendix E, paragraph 15).

While her singing teacher proposed contracting a particular muscle, Höller found that by using resistance against the earth she got the required strength along with an easy posture, a comfortable body sensation. When we spoke Höller had a book in preparation, which has since been released (in German only). While her own work has

continued to grow and flourish, she regards Middendorf breathwork as the foundation for it:

The perceptible breath I appreciate very much, and when I publish the book, once you will see, the biggest part is the breath part. Because this is the profound human being, and I want to clarify also for performers that you cannot manage the breath, because the breath is our being. We can experience the breath and with it ourself but when we start to manage and lead the breath, we create a disorder in ourself (Appendix E, paragraph 19).

This is similar to what Kristen Linklater says about breath as cited earlier:

Conscious control of the breath will destroy its sensitivity to changing inner states, and severely curtail the reflex connection of breathing and emotional impulse (1976, 25).

For Linklater this means leaving breath alone. For Höller and Middendorf breathwork it means connecting to breath, not through conscious control but through presence and the perception of sensation, and thereby connecting to inner states and emotional impulses.

To sing out, to perform, requires voluntary strength as well:

Middendorf work is a clear instruction to go profound[ly] inside of yourself and to develop the being. That means all the inner spaces and these breathing spaces are useful for the voice. But not enough for a good performing and good voice at all (Appendix E, paragraph 23).

For Höller ‘good voice’ is a question of balancing inner work with the strength and capacity to come into the outer without manipulating the vocal folds or the breath (Appendix E, paragraph 25).

Letizia Fiorenza is a singer who specialises in the folk songs of the south of Italy, where she comes from. She is also a qualified

Middendorf breathwork practitioner of many years standing and teaches at Ursula Schwendimann’s Middendorf Institute in

Männedorf. She was a student of Maria Höller for many years and now collaborates and teaches with her. I interviewed Fiorenza at her home a little way from Zurich a few days after the four-day Atem Tonus Ton workshop she and Höller taught (see Appendix F).

Fiorenza distinguishes three directions for those following Middendorf breathwork – spiritual, health and well-being, and creative-artistic- expressive. Like Höller, Fiorenza is most interested in the creative path, and in ‘authentic’ performance:

if you realize that in all moments of your life you are complete, you can live more happily and on stage you transmit this feeling to the audience through your body and your voice and they accept you, and are touched by you being authentic. Authentic does not mean perfect! (Appendix F, paragraph 4).

Fiorenza regards the breathwork as the foundation of her capacity as an artist to connect with her creativity:

Through this work with the breath and body I learned to develop the body, the force, the presence, the connection through the soul and the voice, all the things you need if you perform, yes, to be strong (Appendix F, paragraph 9).

I think for an artist to discover the potential of your creativity inside is very important. That is also Ilse’s work. It’s Ilse’s work … to learn to trust your body, your breath, your inspiration! (Appendix F, paragraph 13).

Fiorenza refers to Höller’s work as a ‘natural continuation’ of Ilse Middendorf’s work:

You work through the tonus of the muscles, you go outside with the voice, you discover another dimension of the breath. The most wonderful thing for me was, that with this new dimension I could go deeper into Ilse’s work (Appendix F, paragraph 11).

In response to my remark that, even though Middendorf breathwork was not intended as a way of working with voice, it seems to provide a good bodily ground for voice, Fiorenza replied:

Oh yes, it’s a perfect ground if you have time to do it. I think it’s wonderful, I think it’s the best thing we could do because it’s so real, it’s pure and sincere, it’s authentic (Appendix F, paragraph 26).

That she says ‘if you have time to do it’ is indicative of the way that Middendorf breathwork takes a lot of time, something not readily available in educational institutions.

Brigitte Wellner was a guest at the second segment of the

breathwork training in Berkeley in April 2004. Whereas I had heard of Höller and her work I had not previously heard of Wellner. She

offered a short class in her voice work on the evening before the segment began, and I interviewed her later in that segment (see Appendix G).

Wellner took singing lessons for three years beginning when she was twenty-one. She found her voice deteriorating over that time. ‘And I noticed that many people at Music School begin with a real nice voice and they end with a terrible voice or the voice is even

unhealthy in the end’ (Appendix G, paragraph 2). In her search for solutions to this she studied the Schlaffhorst-Andersen method of breathwork, did a lot of Feldenkrais and Alexander technique, and took part in a five-year ‘functional voice’ training based on the work of Cornelius Reid. She began teaching singing when she was twenty- five, and at the time of my interview had been developing her teaching work for thirty-three years. She first met Middendorf

breathwork in 1984, started the training in 1988 and finished in 1992. Wellner describes her method of working with voice as ‘voice

experience’, paralleling ‘Breathexperience’, the trade-marked name for Middendorf breathwork in America:

The methods are in line with the methods of our breathwork. The inhalational impulse must come on its own, and that’s very important for the quality of voice, too. And that you feel where your breath or your voice wants to go, without any pushing (Appendix G, paragraph 5).

For many years now she has used the same approach for singing and speaking:

The basic training, to open the throat and to let it free, and to get a healthy voice that you can express what you want with your speaking or in your singing, that’s the same training for all (Appendix G,

Wellner regards letting the inhalation come on its own as the first vital step for voice work:

the base is the inhale, that you let come the inhale on its own, that’s important, otherwise there is a strain on the vocal cords. So our breath work is a very good base for voice work (Appendix G, paragraph 27).

Then she works with humming and allowing the jaw and tongue to move gently in the mouth, and with what she calls ‘basic sound’:

And then if you let then the sound flow, if you open only the mouth, you will feel what I did with you first, that there is a sound, I call it basic sound, that is a mixture between A and O and er, er [the schwa], like you are lazy and you are too lazy to pronounce some vowels. And with this sound, the vocal cords can learn to work in a very effective way (Appendix G, paragraph 27).

She begins in a very soft and easy way, including sensing ‘where is my voice, what do I hear?’ (Appendix G, paragraph 27) and then chooses from a big range of exercises:

then you train the tongue, you train the jaw, the movement of the jaw, you train the other muscles, and all the time the whole body too, that the inhale goes into the movement, into the feet, like our work (Appendix G, paragraph 28).

Wellner regards Middendorf breathwork as:

a very good base for the voice. But also Feldenkrais is a good base, Alexander technique is also a good base. Because some people have not such a connection to the breath, so we can offer them another method for the voice (Appendix G, paragraph 16).

For those who do connect with breath Middendorf’s is:

a good method because it lets you into the deep and then your singing will become a singing that comes out of the soul and is not a technical singing. And that’s the most important thing, that you sing with your whole person and that you don’t sing only with a technique (Appendix G, paragraph 16).

In summary, Middendorf breathwork practitioners I interviewed who work with voice all agree that the practice of Middendorf breathwork enables people to connect with themselves, their creativity, in a way that allows this to be expressed in their voices. Voice connected to the whole person in this way carries an authenticity of expression that audiences recognise. The capacity to allow the inhalation to come on its own seems to be foundational to this. None of the four suggests that Middendorf breathwork provides the only path to such authenticity.

Overall it is clear that Middendorf breathwork, with its kinæsthetic foundation and connections to the sources of artistic creativity, is work most suitable as a foundation for voicework, both in speaking and singing. Whether it can fit into an educational institution is another matter.