Summary of my first year at the Operas Factory of UNESP
Step One: Memorizing the music
The first step is to memorize the music and to study it until it is completely memorized. As Abel Rocha once said, to study until this song is your favorite. To learn it by heart.
Abel Rocha is a great Brazilian conductor, and he is my teacher too. He inspires me a lot!
Learning by heart means to sing the music over and over, putting sound into it. Finding out each little note, how it should be sounding, using the resounding points and making the sound reverberates in the whole head, feeling the support. And feeling that wonderful feeling of “I’m rocking”,” that sound is filling me, and that makes me happy. So happy that I feel confident enough to let go and express myself. ”
Study by remembering the quaver. To make an expressive phrasing, the tip is to start feeling the Quaver Tempo slower, to go faster until you reach the most important word of the sentence (you must choose one word to be the apex), then return to the tempo, WITHOUT LOSING MUSIC TIME. At first it gives a feeling of “Oh my God! It’s not going to work! It’s all out of time! Will my teacher be angry with me? Insecure people will undestand me. People who are possibly so thirsty for knowledge that when they see something incredible they feel like jumping around and hugging everyone.
One more phrasing tip. It is not enough to understand only the text. How to do the music steps? Musically, structurally, sometimes the text asks for a crescendo and a legatto. Just do the crescendo, gradually increasing the energy, using the consonants to make the legatto, and congratulating yourself, because now you are rocking!
How to memorize the music without forgetting the accompaniment rhythms?
I received a wonderful tip from Andrey Ivanov, Abel Rocha’s regency pupil, who plays the piano wonderfully: Even if you do not play the piano beautifully, at least you can play the bass of the song and sing your line, making a conduction’s map of the song, where the melody goes and which voice of the accompaniment is the melody. Even if the voices are from the piano itself. Understand it and put it all together, even if it sounds like a “lalalala pause pause”. It has just to be something that makes sense to you. You will not need to submit a musical review work. What really matters is the final product, not the process. So play! Create your interpretation, and make it easier to memorize.
From the moment the music is memorized, it is likely we have understood what the text means and its scenic sense. Then we have the second step.
Step two: Understanding the text of the music.
It is necessary to have the knowledge of the whole text, to understand where each character goes, who is the main character, what the status quo is, where the modifying event is in the story, and how that modification effectively changes the character you are studying. Taking as basis my last experience of this year:
In “The Old Maid and the Thief”, which is the freshest one in the head, the status quo was the boredom that the old maid felt. “Isn’t the weather awful?”. When people are bored, the first thing they talk about is the weather. The weather is impersonal. No one will ever feel offended by a weather comment. (I think so… hahaha!).
The status quo was the boredom and sadness of being single and having been abandoned 40 years ago by a man. The modifying event of the piece was the appearance of a beggar. And how does it modify the plot of the story?
The old maid falls in love with him, and her maid, Leticia, too. And the old maid does everything she can to keep the beggar in her house, because “dying for a man can be better than living without one”. We’ve made this opera in Portuguese, so I don’t know exactly the words they sing in English. I am sorry.
The appearance of the beggar makes the protagonist completely change her life. She, who heads the anti-alcohol committee, who knows every one of the city, finds herself in a situation where she has no other choice but to steal a bar and steal Church money. And she did everything to prove her love for the beggar. And she did it all induced by Leticia, who takes advantage of the emotional fragility of the Old Maid to manipulate her.
This is an example. The example of what I did some weeks ago. Understanding the plot, the modifying agent, and how the story is moved through it, will make all singing study be adapted and complemented with this new knowledge.
Step Three: Creating the Scenic Body.
For me, Erica, it is easier to understand the character using body exercises. Vector exercises. Where does the movement start? From the shoulders, forward? From the bones of the hip? How is the character’s walk? How does she think? What does she think while she is not acting?
Memorizing scene marks is another activity that we should do by ourselves at home, and creating a meaning for each mark. In the previous opera that I did, The Magic Flute, which I found very difficult to memorize the choreograph, I drew frame by frame all the character movements in paint brush. “When Tamino says so, I go to the left.”
After all this is drawn, it is time to MEAN the movement. Why do I go to the left? Why would this character go to the left? Creating a particular reason is part of a good work of each actor.
It is important to care about the interaction with the other characters. How does your character act like when you’re alone? And how does your character act about the other character? How is their relationship? Even if there is not a proper moment in the piece of internal dialogue, it is interesting to know what his/her personality is like, and to know “what he/she thinks about others”. This makes you create movement on the scene, and this makes the audience understand who your character is.
Step Four: Praying for everything to be right on time! Hahaha!
Joking aside, keeping a calm spirit is very important. After so much studying, understanding, and making all this being natural for you, it is time to let yourself go, relax and enjoy the scene. That was a tip from my colleague Vicente Sampaio, a magnificent baritone, and he said it to me a few moments before I came on the scene, when I was basically desperate, crying and blurring all my makeup!
Making your movementes clear and clean. Try to do one action at time instead of shaking, no matter how much the moment is shaken. This makes it easier to punctuate the moments already found in the interpretation above.
Step Five: Do not believe in limitations. They lie! Hahaha! I’m a joker today!
Sometimes you are so interested to do your best that it is possible to happen to you to listen too much the others opinion, without filtering. I don’t think that a colleague will deliberately denigrate your work (I really hope so! Haha!), but sometimes we feel so anxious that a simple “you could do better by rounding your voice” can make us feel the worst person in the world.
THE DREAM IS YOURS. The only way for you to reach your dream is doing your best for it. Use the strength of your fear to go on!