ABSTRACT
Activating the Body The quality and expressiveness of the singing sound you make depends as much on feeling and imagination as on your actual physical engagement with the sound. Your voice and body need to continue their development together as they did during their 'golden age' in infancy. Your body is the 'ground' for all your feelings and thoughts - and songs. Once you know how to fill your body with breath and resonance, you will always be singing 'from the ground up', whether you are standing still, lying down, hanging upside down (it can happen!) or dancing around. The French singer known to millions simply as Barbara describes in her autobiography, 77 était un piano noir (1996), the moment when suddenly her singing no longer allowed her to stand still. It was, she writes, as though sound moved through her entire body, forcing her to move with it, to use the space she inhabited and to go with the flow of music and feeling through her body.
