All-Singing, All-Dancing

Posted on by RoseIW

Last week, I was asked to run a singing workshop at a summer school for a group of 22 dance students between the ages of 5 and 12. I agonised, for days, over what on earth I could teach that would hold the interest of all students, male and female, from the youngest to the oldest.

And then, thanks to my cranky old iPod, it came to me. A classic: ‘Do-Re-Mi’ from The Sound of Music.

I’d warm up with some basic vocal games and exercises and then move on to a rousing rendition of Disney’s ‘Let It Go’ to get them through the initial embarrassment of singing in front of other people, something half of them had never done before. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t need to hand out words for this one! Frozen fever is still strong with children everywhere, it seems…

And then we would turn our attention to the main event. They seemed to enjoy the workshop, but it struck me just how afraid they all were of their own voices, how nervous of messing up the song. So we added some silly actions and I made the one twelve-year-old in the room our Maria, in an effort to boost her obviously low confidence in her voice.

“I can’t sing on my own,” she said. “I can’t sing.”

“You can,” I insisted. “I’ve been listening to you for the last half an hour, you’ve got a lovely voice!”

She gave it a go, and I had to turn the backing track right down for her to be heard. On her second attempt, she was a little louder. By run-through number three she held her head up high and sang to the rest of the room.

It was amazing to watch these children, some as young as five, engaging with a classic musical theatre number and with each other, offering encouragement and help to those who struggled to remember the words or the actions.

Singing workshops are difficult – you never know what you’re going to be faced with, if they’ll like the song you’ve chosen or if they’ll throw themselves into the work or not. But I can honestly say, having run many more workshops for adults than children, what most amazed me was how, after their initial shyness, the children gave the workshop their all and tried every single thing I threw at them without fear of reproach or ridicule from their peers.

That rarely happens in the adult workshops, where you can be facing a roomful of people who have spent their whole lives believing they ‘can’t sing’ and spend the whole time battling that notion. In the twelve-year-old ‘Maria’ that process had already started.

I find it fascinating, but also sad. And I feel privileged to have been given the opportunity to work with the children I met last week – I hope they went away feeling as confident in themselves as I felt in them. What a wonderful way to spend a day!

Radio Silence

Posted on by RoseIW

Sorry for the radio silence!

This blogging lark is harder than I thought – I have so much I want to blog about, but finding a) the time and b) the guts to write what I’m thinking and press ‘publish’ is proving to be harder than I thought.

For someone who is fairly extroverted, this came as quite a shock.

After all, I’ve never had problems making myself heard! I speak up in meetings, I’ll prance and dance about on a stage from dawn ’til dusk and at parties you’ll find me hogging the karaoke microphone or participating in a dance-off in the centre of the floor.

I was a writer for a living for two years before I fell into my current job; I’ve written enough programme bios to make me sick of the sight of my own name; I run more theatrical social media accounts than I have fingers to type.

Why, then, do I find blogging so bloody difficult?

There’s a certain amount of pressure, I suppose, when you’re writing a blog, to be witty or funny or to write a post that will go viral. To blog every day lest you lose readers, to dedicate all your time to social media lest you lose followers, to change the world, to make a difference, to make millions.

There’s the worry of being shot down, that the words you’ve spent hours choosing and ordering simply won’t be good enough for the legions of strangers reading them.

There’s the need to be liked, the need to have your voice heard, the need to put your opinion somewhere in the hope of finding like-minded souls to whom your ideas will really mean something.

For me, though, none of that matters. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it would be nice to make millions or change the world, but for now I have a much smaller, much humbler goal in mind:

Being myself.

Sounds a little silly, doesn’t it?

And perhaps it is. But I’ve spent so much time trying to work out what the ‘point’ of this blog should be that I lost sight of why I started doing it in the first place: to have a platform for myself, be it for reviews, embarrassing stage stories, questions, opinions or otherwise.

Perhaps a clearer focus will come with time, but for now I’m just happy ambling through the world of blogging while I find my feet.

Who knows? Maybe, slowly, I’ll even get to grips with the fact that I don’t always have to be the all-singing, all-dancing personality I’m best-known for to get people to listen. Or read.

So here I am, ready to blog, with a new enthusiasm and the realisation that not every post has to be a life-affirming masterpiece or a tale of comic genius.

I hope you’ll stick with me – I have a feeling it’s going to be quite a ride!