Summer review: Voice lessons, new projects, and tons of musicals

On paper, my NUS transcript is as dull as it gets. I'm a member of the FASS Club and NUSSU like everyone else. The only activity I participated in was Orientation 2021, which was online, and I was absent half the time because this time last year I was working part-time as an assistant teacher in an afternoon school. I don't have an internship, I attended a CFG workshop called "No internship how?" just so that I can spread my theatre agenda and walk away with free bubble tea.

So since I've just concluded my first summer at NUS, and some time during the summer I wrote a little piece about feeling unproductive while on holiday. This post is the answer to my rejection of the "internship-or-die" mentality that seems to plague university students locally. There are indeed certain privileges I have/do not have that result in choices being made, but my scope and target audience was specifically students who do not actively need employment for financial survival or an edge in a competitive industry, but who feel pressured by the competition to find something for themselves to do during the summer. Chances are that said students do not even know why they are there doing the internship, or what they want to do after they graduate. So with no internship, they sit at home, fretting about their future and bemoaning their lack of one. Now, I have to preface that I am not against internships, or extracurriculars or anything institutional. I simply do not vibe with that side of the global economy, just like plenty of people would never choose a theatre career, and that's okay in my books because everyone has preferences.

What's not okay is forcing yourself to do something against your will because someone said it's better. Better for what? For whom? I really dislike this culture, mainly because I have never been persuaded by convention ("because everyone else is doing it!") and I do not see a need to start now. I also dislike the fact that everyone is funneled into the same system that churns out office workers year after year - before those kids even get a chance to individuate and realize what they are meant to do in this lifetime. They wake up years later, and regret not heeding the siren call of whatever they should have wanted, but pushed aside in the name of "pragmatism". After all, pragmatism got them nowhere but into a dreary office job that they are trying to run away from. I refuse to follow this path.

All I want is to do things consciously, mindfully, purposefully. Because awareness and intention is everything. In the theatre, in university, in life. Not everything can go my way, but with what I can change, I do everything in my power to work on it. This summer is thus my little experiment on living life to the fullest and hitting every mark I can hit.

That's my rather long preamble to this post. Let's begin with the partially complete laundry list:

• A new webseries, where I'm working on everything from research on the Chicago of the East - that's Toa Payoh - to the dialogue and story beats, to playing Elise. More on that later.
• My first live musical theatre performance with a public audience.
• An incredible birthday party at Changi Jewel, planned by my JC gang with my sister without me even realizing.
• An equally incredible week after of theatre shows and a close shave with COVID.
• Many, many musicals. Quasimodo, Faghag, Big Brown Girl, Into The Woods, Title Of Show, Where Wildflowers Grow. That's more theatre this year than I've watched in the rest of my lifetime, bootlegs excluded.
• Voice lessons! It's something I've always wanted but I feared it was prohibitively expensive. I'm currently earning money to co-pay with my parents who have kindly supported me in my external study of musical theatre.

Webseries

I won't get anywhere without talking about the webseries first. A 48-hour film lab (which also gave me my 4th short film credit) turned into the largest thing that has happened for my acting career so far, and I am endlessly grateful for the opportunity to research, write, act and handle publicity for a whole series that is set for production. I did not actually imagine that it could happen, and truthfully, no 20-year-old baby actor who has been humbled by the state of the industry goes around thinking that they have it lined up for them. I'm intensely aware of how unlikely this is, and I can't wait to throw in my 1000% in getting this show somewhere. I'll probably dedicate another blog post to this someday. Remind me.

Voice Lessons

It has been 17 weeks since I began voice lessons. Musical theatre singing is an entire art unto itself, and as I learned for myself, patience is an incredible virtue when it comes to vocal training. For the brevity of this post, I'll run through my vocal progress in three main sections.

Problem solving

When I began singing, I faced multiple issues including enunciation, breath control, and a weak passagio. I have been pronouncing certain sounds wrong my entire life, and to finally correct them was an initially frustrating, but ultimately rewarding process. In terms of breath control, I have a tendency to freeze up in my lower body - even today when I went out with Nelson for a little practice outside the Esplanade, The Wizard And I did not come out the way I wanted it to. That is something I need to work on, by setting up the space properly in my vocal tract. My middle notes have been steadily improving since I began working on sirens, and I say all this with the understanding that I am nowhere near where I can eventually be, yet.

The good thing is that I have developed a lot more awareness of how I approach the singing voice. There are certain ingrained habits including vocal slurs, retracting the tongue, vocal folds being blown apart by excess air, as well as uncontrolled vocal onset and offset that I need to work on. Those are small and practical goals which I can work on, and it is my aim to make sure that I make concrete progress in the next semester, all the way to the year end. My goal for this month is to ensure complete contact between my vocal folds across my entire range, which involves vocal fry and sirens on 'ng'. In future, I hope to work on breath support and control over vocal coloring.

Vocal coloring

Twang, cry, belt, sirens, scales, slides. Vocal coloring is a term that I use to describe the more artistic side of singing, which involves modulating the voice so that it takes on certain characteristics for each situation, both for performance and sustainability. Twang and cry were two really new aspects of my voice that I had not realized was the key to getting a brighter sound. When I found my twang for the first time, I felt like I had finally found something I thought I did not have - it was bright, clean, sharp, and it could cut across the room. The cry helped the twang to sound less grating, by rounding off the sound and allowing it to remain bright nevertheless. My job now is to smooth over the transitions between higher and lower registers while switching between different vocal colors, which is proving to be a more difficult task than I thought, but practice makes perfect.

The brain stuff

Music theory and acting. Hey, you may have listened to every cast recording there is, and you may have sung through every riff there is on YouTube, but you haven't really experienced the brain stuff until you hear about Laban, Stanislavski, and doing the mental sums in your head about triplets, whole notes, half-notes, quarters, eighths and so on. I also learned about fermata, downbeats, dynamics and so on - and those will be important notes for analyzing the relationship between the music and the performer in each song.

Conclusion

National Day this year coincides with my second day of being a college sophomore (Singaporean: University Year 2 student). It's still a little odd matching the concept of summer with the Singaporean education system because that's pretty much the only season we have, but here we are, I just concluded my very first summer holidays. It's very wacky, it has its high and low points, and at every turn I learned something new. I would not trade it for anything.