Breathing in Fitzmaurice Voicework*

(part one: Releasing Your Breathing)

One way to develop greater vocal freedom, flexibility, and strength is to develop a spontaneous, flexible flow of breathing. The relationship between breathing, experience and expression is rich and complex. In the next few pages, I’ll touch on aspects of that relationship which you’ll encounter in the first part of Fitzmaurice Voicework, Destructuring.

The basic process of Destructuring involves putting yourself into various physical positions and then inviting your experience, your breathing, and your voice to unfold spontaneously. As you do this, your breathing begins to open in places where it has been inflexible. At the same time, parts of your body, feelings, imagination, and voice that have been chronically held, for any number of reasons, also begin to open.

Throughout the process of Destructuring, the breathing is central. Here’s why:

Breath is the energy for voice:

EXERCISE: hold your breath and speak or sing at the same time.

Did you make any sound? If so, you weren’t really holding your breath. Breath pressure is required to make sound; it is the energy source for your voice. No breath, no voice. Simple.

Restricted breathing constricts the throat and the voice:

When the breathing in the torso is restricted, and there is too little air to make sound easily, the throat constricts to conserve air in order to prolong the exhaled airflow, so you can keep on speaking or singing. This can be subtle or it can be dramatic. It can be in a specific context or it can be chronic. When the breathing is more free, the throat and voice do not need to constrict.

EXERCISE: don’t inhale and then express the following thought WITH GLEE five times without stopping to inhale: “I am the greatest performer of all time.” Don’t push too hard and hurt yourself! Notice what happens. Some of you may notice that your pitch rises in a similar way to the way pitch rises in some people when they are emotional. It isn’t so much a “pitch problem”: it is the direct result of constricted breathing. Likewise, some of you will notice that you are rushing to get the words out. That’s not a “speeding” problem; it’s a lack of air.

Excessive force of breath constricts the throat and the voice:

This is exactly the opposite condition as in number 2 above, but the results are the same. When the breath is forced out too quickly by squeezing in the ribs or the obliques (part of the abdomen), the throat constricts to prolong airflow so you can continue to make sound. When the breathing is more free and easy, the throat and voice do not need to constrict.

EXERCISE: blow air out and talk or sing at the same time. Don’t hurt yourself!

We limit what we experience by controlling and restricting our breathing:

We control our breathing to reduce the impact of difficult feelings and experiences. That’s not a bad thing. It’s an important ability we have.

For performers, the difficulty comes when our ability to manage our experience by controlling our breathing becomes habitual, becomes an instant unconscious response to stress of all kinds. Over time whole parts of our bodies, our imaginations, our emotional life – in short, our experience – can become unconsciously locked and unavailable. It is very hard to express vocally what you cannot experience. Performers often push the voice to compensate, and that can cause strain or fatigue.

EXERCISE: close your eyes and imagine that the experience you are having right now is extremely pleasurable. Notice your breathing. Now imagine that you dislike your experience, that you want to distance yourself from it. Notice your breathing again. How has it changed?

We limit what we express by restricting our breathing:

This is a normal and helpful ability. However, most of us have learned so profoundly that certain kinds of expression (such as joy, sadness, power, vulnerability, etc.) are not okay, that we chronically inhibit our breathing to stop the expression. That inhibition, which is effected by limiting muscular movement, not only limits our expression in the moment, but over time it also chronically “armors” the body.

Body armoring, in turn, reduces access to our experience, to our impulses, which then further limits our ability to express and communicate.

An analogous process happens with bodily injury. If you sprain an ankle, your body very intelligently swells to prevent movement. If after the sprain is healed you don’t begin to move your ankle, it will become chronically stiff. In this way temporary armoring can become chronic armoring that limits the healthy functioning of the body. So in some sense Destructuring is a gentle invitation to experience movement where there has been holding.

Places we have chronically inhibited breathing limit resonance:

In order to produce a sound, you need three things: an energy source, something that vibrates, and a resonator (a place for the vibrations to multiply).

For our voices, the energy source is the exhaling breath, what vibrates are the vocal folds, and the resonator is the whole body. When parts of the body are held chronically, our resonance is diminished:

• The entire torso can be involved in breathing, and chronic inhibitions in the breathing lock the torso. This in turn limits resonance and the feeling of the whole body vibrating, getting a sonic massage, as we make sound.
• Sometimes the trapping of experience and expression and breathing happens in the neck, making it effectively a bottleneck. This creates a sense of being disembodied, of the head and body being separate. This limits the ease and resonance of the voice. It also leads to “from the neck up” acting and singing.
• As we are speaking or singing, the flow of breathing comes all the way through the mouth, and inhibitions of experience, expression and breathing enabled by holding in the mouth, head, and face significantly limit resonance.

When you free areas of the body that are part of the breath reflex (the wavelike movement of the torso as it breathes), as well as other areas through which breathing moves both literally and experientially, then natural resonance is freed as well.

EXERCISE: hold a half-full bottle of water by the cap, and pretend the bottle is a drum. Your hand hitting the bottle will be the energy source for the sound. The place you hit the bottle will be the place that vibrates.  The whole bottle will be the resonant chamber.

Hit it in the middle of the bottle so it makes a sound. Now hold the bottle around the middle with one hand to inhibit the resonance. Hit it again and compare the quality of the sound. You will notice that the second sound is dampened considerably.

Inspiration = Inhale = Idea:

The word inspiration means both having an idea and taking a breath. Our thoughts and our breathing are linked. Your body is wired to take in exactly the right amount of breath for each thing you want to express and to do so instantly. In this way your body reflects moment by moment, through the breathing, what is happening in your experience.

The amount of breath you take in before expressing a thought is determined by the length and intensity of your thought as well as space and distance considerations. It happens instinctually and instantly. Locked breathing can distort this simple connection.

A disjunction between thoughts and the words that are used (such as can happen when the words we are using are not our own, (e.g., acting and singing)) also distorts this connection. Good acting or singing technique that enables you to make the words your own, in the context of the story, is crucial. So is freeing the breathing so that it can respond instantly and accurately to any thought.

EXERCISE:say “No” in an easy way in response to the question, “Would you like some pie?” Notice how much breath you took in as you inhaled before saying,”No.”

In response to the same question, say, “I’ve told you before that I don’t ever want any of that horrible pie that you keep trying to give to me.” Notice that you instinctually take in more breath for that thought. Notice also that if you create different scenarios in which to say these same words, the breathing must also change.

Breath = Life Force:

The Latin word for spirit, spiritus, is derived from the word for breathe, spiro. The Chinese word chi (or qi) means both breath and life force. In Sanskrit prana means both breath and life force.

This connection is true in a great number of languages. It needn’t be just a metaphor. By opening up the breathing and becoming aware of a felt sense of the breath traveling throughout the body (which it literally does in the form of red blood cells), we can develop a greater life force, a greater presence, which in turn can be communicated vocally.

Breathing is both involuntary and voluntary:

Breathing is one of the only systems of the body that is both voluntary and involuntary. It is a nexus of the conscious and unconscious, of the central and autonomic nervous systems. It both reveals what is happening moment by moment, and it manages what is happening. Exploring that connection – between impulse and action, reflex and choice – is gold for the performer.

Most of us are adept at managing the breath consciously and unconsciously. It is often much harder to let the breath respond freely to each moment, especially under difficult circumstances (such as those that are encountered by performers).

Destructuring is about uncovering that freedom, about consciously releasing the breath and voice. In that sense it is also about uncovering a greater sense of wholeness, of opening to the full spectrum of experience and expression.

EXERCISE:Try controlling your breathing and then try letting it go.Do you really know what the experience of letting your breath go is (while you are aware of your breathing)?

Breathing can change moment by moment as it responds to and affects your experience. So can the experience of Destructuring. The process can be very fluid:

People have very different experiences doing this work, and the experiences can change often. There isn’t a single right response, there is just moving toward easier flow and greater openness to what is actually happening, whether it is comfortable or uncomfortable. Here’s a brief account of a workshop I taught in San Francisco a few years ago to illustrate the point.

We were a couple days into the introduction, and in one of the rows there were four students. The first student cried the whole morning. The second one laughed the whole morning. The third one seemed to be having a mellow, pleasurable experience. I couldn’t tell what was happening with the fourth student.

At the end of the morning, we talked over what had happened. The first student gestured toward the second student and said, “I was so jealous of you. I was miserable the whole day and you were having such a great time.” The second student said, “I was jealous of you! Here I was only able to laugh while you were having the deep experience that I longed for.” The third student said, “I wanted to laugh or to cry. My experience was pleasant but so lacking in powerful emotion. I wasn’t able to get what you two were getting.”

We talked for a bit about how there wasn’t a right response, and how funny it was that each of them had wanted the other’s experience and not accepted their own experience as valid or right, and that paradoxically, in not accepting their specific experiences they probably also prolonged them.

At that point, the fourth student spoke up. “Nothing happened for me at all!” As she spoke, she seemed angry. When I asked her about it, at first she said she wasn’t angry. Then she said she thought that maybe she had been angry the whole morning because nothing had been happening for her the whole morning. Later she realized that during the morning she had distanced herself from her anger by deciding that her anger was about her lack of experience, when in fact her experience was that she was angry and she hadn’t wanted to accept it.

As you do this work, you practice opening up to what is happening rather than trying to make something happen that you think ought to be happening. Be an explorer who is curious about your experience rather than a dictator who has decided in advance what the experience should look like.

Sometimes you might access challenging aspects of your experience during Destructuring. So long as you are not injuring yourself, it is possible to learn to release into that experience, to breathe with it, to become the experience rather than being the watcher of your experience. This in turn releases energy that may have been trapped in your body for a long time. The release of that tremendous energy of containment, if not forced or hindered, gives you greater access to your experience and your ability to express it.

The Pleasure of Free Breathing:

Sometimes it’s just fun!

© 2004 by Saul Kotzubei

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