Expert Bodywork to free your singing voice…
More than 40 years experience working with stage professionals
in New York City,
Washington, D.C.
& Chicago
Your instrument is your body which generates your voice. It is all you really have. And you have to care for it well as someone who performs for live audiences. It must be at its tip-top condition in order to emit a voice that is clear, resonant, relaxed and authentic. It must match the essential signature of your speaking voice since they are one and the same voice. Actor Judy Dench shares a story when director Hal Prince gave her advice to ‘sing in the same voice she spoke in’. This she said served her extremely well in her career as an actor. Yes we can portray other characters but it must be grounded on our authentic-vocal signature.
Hands-on training!
Intrinsic Body Training for singers, actors and those in the performing arts is the result of my life journey as an actor-singer, trainer and therapist for this community. I was trained as a massage therapist is 1983 at the Swedish Insitute of Allied Sciences in NYC and did my Rolfing® Structural Integration training at the Rolf Institute, being certified in 1985. For twenty years, I worked almost exclusively with singers from the Broadway stage, opera, pop and rock world, helping them release stored tension/fear that they had acquired in their body-psyche in the course of growing up and which limits access to the core muscles that we sing with. These core muscles (called also intrinsic, or emotional, or initiatory muscles) are our survival muscles, deep within us. They are negatively impacted by acquired fear/unresolved trauma and you have to know how to help the individual release that fear non-invasively and without driving it deeper.
That is what I do. And my work is a direct experience of my own journey as an actor-singer who developed a level of virtuosity in my performing. See the video below to hear me sing. I achieved this after years of study and performing in New York City. This is my life’s Path.
Intrinsic Bodywork is the result of my direct experience of using the principles of Rolfing and other sophisticated hands-on body training and my education and training as a psychotherapist since 1982, to streamline the singer’s learning trajectory, in concert with physiological singing training that comes from the theatre world and the opera world’s Physiological Bel Canto Italian Singing Tradition that I learned from my teacher and collaborator Margaret Laughlin Riddleberger of the Washington, DC. community.
It is my direct experience and streamlined approach to quickly uncovering a person’s vocal instrument (it’s the body girl friend) that has been obscured by a lifetime of accidents, injuries, fear, anxiety, violence and aggression, and much more in the course of growing up.