Singing

Within the discipline of singing, I found maintaining the “legit” style of singing to be a hurdle that I needed to overcome. This was brought to my attention in my December singing assessment feedback (Item 2), but I noticed my flaws in this style most prominently in the first Acting Through Song class, where I sang Life Is Just A Bowl Of Cherries (George White’s Scandals, 1931). (Item 3) Something that had been taught to me was that the legit sound needed a lot of space in the mouth, to achieve the required rounded sound, done by lifting the soft palate. I did have the space in my mouth that helps in creating that legit quality of voice, which was an initial cause of my frustration in the correction here; I felt that I was doing the correct technique, but struggling to get the desired results. This frustration led to me doing the wider research into this style, (Pauley, 2021) which showed me that the issue was my mouth shape being more stretched out horizontally, which was counter-intuitive to getting the tall vowel sounds needed. The article mentioned that “the vowels will be round and open”, this demonstrating to me that I needed more focus on the shape of the words, rather than simply assuming that having space in my mouth would be sufficient. Some wider research that I did on this topic took me to looking into operatic vocalists, given how legit singing shares some qualities with the operatic style. Jerome Hines’ book where he interviewed opera singers on their technique was particularly useful to me, showing me a number of different ways and perspectives on how to go about getting the ideal sound. A quote in this (Hines, 1984:28) from John Alexander proved to tackle exactly the issue that I faced, and was particularly helpful to my improvement:

When I say ‘as much space as possible’, that means the same thing to me as ‘relaxed,’ a relaxed openness. The key to this is the mouth: if we try to spread the mouth, this is what happens to the tone, it is too spread. In conclusion, when we think of space, we should think of vertical space rather than horizontal space.

One other thing that was helpful in attempting to get the correct sound for this was listening to the recorded version of Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries (Merman, 1949), as listening to somebody of the time period singing would be a pointer in the right direction, letting me analyse the specifics of sounds being used. This shifted my focus in where I needed to improve, and something that I found to be particularly helpful in finding this new method of creating the correct quality of sound was my performance of I Don’t Know What I’d Do Without You (A Gentleman’s Guide To Love and Murder, 2012) in Acting Through Song. (Item 4) This song is performed in a heightened RP accent, RP meaning received pronunciation. The work done in accent classes on vowels specifically for heightened RP showed me how to create the character for this with the heavily exaggerated accent, the hookline in Item 5 being the most helpful to me for this; the repetition in it of “heart” put a useful emphasis onto the lengthening of those vowels. Knowing how it is that the character would speak was very informative on how they would sing, with the singing simply involving lengthening my mouth on the vowel sounds further.

I faced another hurdle during my first attempt at singing Unusual Way (Nine, 1982). (Item 6) This show has a style of music relatively classic to Broadway, with operatic themes and European influences as a link to the setting of the show, this being Venice in Italy. The operatic themes in particular were a hint as to how I should be performing this song vocally. While technically I had learnt this song well, I felt like it sat in an odd part of my voice and was therefore less comfortable with how I felt it sounded. With later work and examination of this song in a Vocal Technique class, it was discovered that my issue was not that it sounded wrong in my voice, but that my tongue placement was making the sounds feel flat. What I needed to do to fix this was to keep the middle of my tongue up. The reason that I hadn’t been doing so in the first place was a misguided belief that a lowered tongue would create more space in my mouth, and therefore lead to the desired, more rounded sound that was classic to opera and that I had been aiming for in this slightly less contemporary song. However, not keeping my tongue raised resulted in the sound being less bright and less pleasant upon the ear, and was the reason as to why I felt as though it sat uncomfortably in my voice. An exercise that we found to be helpful for rectifying this issue was singing scales with a pen under my tongue, using a very bright and exaggerated American accent (Item 7); then, singing the song through with a piece on gum under my tongue that I had to strive to stop my tongue from touching. This was to maintain the raised position of it (Item 8). This exaggerated positioning in my mouth allowed me to create this much clearer and richer tone, forming a mixed sound that was much more suited to the song.

Acting

Dance

Looking at challenges that I have overcome and improved on within my dance training, a primary focus will be on those that I have faced with turning; more specifically, the challenges that I have faced with my spotting. While I have not yet perfected this skill, I have made vast improvements in comparison to where I was at the beginning of this year. This difficulty was mentioned in the jazz dance feedback from my December assessments (Item 14). An issue that I repeatedly had with my spotting was overshooting the spot, then dragging my head back to where I was supposed to be looking. This would leave me feeling off-kilter after turns despite having attempted spotting, as the motion of whipping my head from the overshot place to the original spot was a disorientating one. I also struggled to bring my head around quickly enough, therefore putting any following dance steps a couple of beats behind as I reconfigured my surroundings. The way that I improved the first issue was by placing my spot slightly earlier in the turn than where I needed to end up; this way, overshooting the spot would get me to where I needed to be facing. Regarding the issue of my head turning too slowly, I did some research into Jack Cole, the man who “is credited as the father of theatrical jazz dance.” (Darkenwald, 2014) He modified African-American dance styles to become what we would now class as classic MT choreography. It was said in Anna Kisselgoff’s New York Times article (Kisselgoff, 1974) that Gwen Verdon described his work, saying, “When you see dancing on television, that’s Jack Cole. In Paris, what they call ‘le Jazz Hot’ is all Jack Cole.” Along this line, while listening to a podcast featuring Phillip Attmore, (Wood, 2025) I heard Attmore mention:

“Everything that we see in a musical, even if it’s all white people on the stage and you think it comes from somewhere else, it came from black artists. And the jazz music, the syncopation, the dance […] even if the sound is a little bit different from what we expect, it’s still jazz music.”

This backed up the roots of musical theatre, and of Jack Cole’s work towards creating Musical Theatre Jazz. This meant that I was able to explore down those roots, looking at which turns existed before the classic jazz ones that we know now, as I felt that seeing how turns have evolved would give me good insight into how to correct my issues. One of the roads that this research took me down was to the fascinating style of Lindy Hop (Barbican Centre, 2010), specifically looking at their tuck turns. The lightning speed with which dancers executed these turns and moved straight to the next steps showed me the absolute precision that I needed, and was a gorgeous spectacle that gave me something to aspire to in the future. An example of my improvement can be seen in an extract from choreography I performed to The More We Dance (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, 1988) (Item 15). My head is coming around a lot more quickly during the turn in this clip, and stopping at the correct centrepoint that I was aiming for. However, my eyes in this clip are still showing as being a little unfocused, showing that I had not spotted flawlessly if there was an element of dizziness still remaining. As this is a skill that I have yet to master fully, I have been continuing to train this area, by practicing spotting without the full technique of a pirouette, instead just turning in circles while spotting a specific point, as this can improve the speed of my head’s movement and the specificity of my gaze onto the desired spot.

While my spotting in single pirouettes has improved, I still find that I struggle when doing multiple turns in a row; for example, chaînés. I recorded some that I did in an exercise of turns down the room, starting with two poses and then going into chaînés until we reached the end of the room (Item 16). The first three chaînés after the poses were relatively well-spotted, with my head turning quickly and fixating on the same spot each time. However, after the third turn in the chaîné sequence, my eyes focused in on a spot to the right of the camera’s perspective, which led to my trajectory spinning to the side, abolishing the straight line of turns that I had so far maintained. This additionally threw me off balance, and Item 16 shows my body slowly tilting as I try to catch myself after each turn. What I have found through further practice, however, was that if I started my turns slower and slowly sped up, then my spotting was maintained even as the speed increased. I noted this when I was learning the turning tap step from Top Hat (Top Hat, 2026). (Item 17). I noticed upon seeing this performance that Phillip Attmore, who was playing the role of Jerry Travers in this production, was spotting the middle of the stage as he span. This is why, in Item 17, I was using a water bottle in the middle of the space as a spotting point. This meant that I would not have to change where it is that I was spotting as the step turned in a circle, allowing for a lesser chance of losing my balance. I think that having gotten down the more detailed footwork helped with this, with tap shoes meaning that my steps had to be very specifically placed and timed. This therefore evidences the progress that I have made and the development in my spotting, even if this does remain to be a work in progress.