Singer Interrupted - Love Singing & Hate Performing - here's why that matters

In this episode of This Is A Voice (S12 Ep6), Jeremy Fisher and Dr Gillyanne Kayes continue the story from “The Secret Singer” (Ep5) and go deeper into what happens when a singer’s path gets interrupted.

Gillyanne shares what came after stopping singing in her late 20s, how she rebuilt confidence (slowly and with care), and why her “happy ending” wasn’t about chasing the stage again. We talk identity, grief, agency and the surprisingly liberating idea that loving singing doesn’t require loving performance.

Then we zoom out into the bigger picture, how singing skills transfer into teaching, leadership, presenting, training and research. Plus, we unpack the difference between rehearsal and performance as totally different nervous system tasks, and why connection with the audience can change everything.

If you’re a singer, teacher, vocal coach, choir leader, or anyone who’s ever felt like you need to “prove” your voice, this one’s for you.

Chapters

00:00 “Singer Interrupted”
01:14 The happy ending (and the grief)
02:45 Returning to singing, rebuilding confidence, technique + agility
05:12 Seven years off singing, and why that can still lead somewhere good
06:15 “Performing spoils my day/week”, permission to redefine success
08:22 Singing identity vs public performance
10:45 What would your happy ending be if you didn’t have to prove anything?
12:19 Teaching, training, presenting, research, performance changes shape
16:47 Connection with the audience, social engagement, polyvagal lens
18:24 Transferable skills singers forget they have
20:04 Rehearsal vs performance, what the audience changes
24:09 Starting from your real emotion, plus “it’s OK to be crap for 10 minutes”
28:37 Nervous system expectations in performance, what helps

Mentioned:
Melissa Forbes, Stop Chasing Perfection, Start Singing for Connection (This Is A Voice Season 11, Ep13 https://youtu.be/r5-Lq4ithDc

Safe Space 2 - Polyvagal Theory for Performance - our new online course with Franka van Essen
https://vocal-process-hub.teachable.com/p/safe-space-2-polyvagal-theory-for-performance-with-franka-van-essen

The Master-Apprentice survey - please fill in this survey (10-20 mins)
https://www.cognitoforms.com/VocalProcess1/Master-Apprentice-Model-In-Singing-Teaching
 

If this episode resonates, drop a comment, what part hit home for you? And tell us, where do you “perform” even when you’re not on a stage?

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Jeremy: This Is A Voice. A podcast with Dr Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher. 

[00:00:17] Jingle: This Is A Voice. 

[00:00:22] Jeremy: Hello and welcome to This is Voice season 12, episode 6. 

[00:00:25] Gillyanne: The podcast where we get Vocal about voice. 

[00:00:28] Jeremy: I'm Jeremy Fisher. 

[00:00:29] Gillyanne: And I'm Dr. Gillyanne Kayes. 

[00:00:30] Jeremy: And the theme today is Singer Interrupted. The story goes on. 

[00:00:35] Gillyanne: Yes. 

[00:00:36] Jeremy: We are actually carrying on from the last episode that we did with The Secret Singer.

[00:00:41] Jeremy: And spoiler alert, if you haven't listened to the episode, you're just about to have the spoiler. The secret singer was Gillyanne. 

[00:00:47] Gillyanne: Yay. 

[00:00:48] Jeremy: So what's the story? 

[00:00:51] Gillyanne: First of all, can we just thank everybody who engaged with the last episode? We had a lot of responses, some of them more personal, some of them just lovely things that people said about what they heard.

[00:01:04] Gillyanne: That's always very nice, isn't it? And it turned out it was a very popular episode, wasn't it? 

[00:01:10] Jeremy: Yes. 

[00:01:10] Gillyanne: Clearly it resonated with a lot of you. So the first thing I want to say for, any people who did listen to the last episode, there is a happy ending 

[00:01:22] Jeremy: that's good 

[00:01:23] Gillyanne: to singer interrupted. For me.

[00:01:27] Gillyanne: Do you know it wasn't about getting back on stage? At least not in a singing context and just let me reverse engineer. 

[00:01:37] Jeremy: Yeah. 

[00:01:37] Gillyanne: Okay. Because the idea that my, my performing career was interrupted and yes, there was grief associated with that and I think, I don't think we can discount that. I think that's real for all sorts of reasons to do with feeling that singing is part of your identity.

[00:01:56] Gillyanne: Uh, So what happened next was yes, I did stop singing and thank goodness that I was teaching. 

[00:02:03] Jeremy: And just to recap, you were at what age? 

[00:02:07] Gillyanne: I was 27. 27. Yeah. When I stopped, I soldiered on for about 18 months hoping that it was gonna get better. I had good days, I had bad days, and in the end I just felt that I couldn't go on. Maybe that happened when I was about 28. So I think I was, Gillyanne tries hard, as it used to say in my school reports. Gillyanne tried hard for two years. 

[00:02:33] Jeremy: Yeah. Can vouch for that. 

[00:02:34] Gillyanne: Yeah. And eventually I stopped and what happened subsequently was a collaborative process with a friend.

[00:02:45] Gillyanne: A friend of mine who was also a singer and who'd also had difficulties and resolved them and continued to sing, and she was also a collaborative pianist and we were chatting about it, one day and she said, maybe we could do some work together. Now, she didn't have a track record of as a teacher.

[00:03:05] Gillyanne: She wasn't asking to be a teacher. She was essentially saying, maybe it doesn't have to be like this. Let's have a listen to what you're doing. And slowly, bit by bit I started singing again and, gaining a little bit of confidence and. Eventually I got to the point where, I was continuing my teaching career, which I absolutely loved.

[00:03:34] Gillyanne: And she said to me, I think. You could go further. I don't feel I can take you further, but come and work with this person who I have, recently trained with who I think is very good.

[00:03:50] Gillyanne: And so I did that and this was a teacher who was very, I think very solid working incrementally on technique and encouraging me to really. To de develop, the sound that I'd gotten now in my mid thirties, something like that. And I do recall that, the one frustration that I'd had all the time as a young professional singer, which was to do with agility.

[00:04:20] Gillyanne: And I didn't really understand how to do mid speed agility. I could do pretty well with fast agility and I loved slow singing with, slow moving stuff with soulful texts and everything. That was my thing. But mid speed agility I often had a problem with. And, once we'd got going again and I was able to sing without straining and pain we looked at this and she said.

[00:04:47] Gillyanne: No, we're not leaving this. This is ridiculous. We've got to sort this out. And we did. And it's something that actually I've never found easy. I have to remind myself of if I'm demonstrating something or if I'm just singing a bit of Handel in the shower or Mozart as you do, as well as the other stuff I sing.

[00:05:08] Gillyanne: But it really did improve. And so eventually I got to the point what are you looking at me for? 

[00:05:14] Jeremy: There's two things. The first one is you glossed over something really quite magnificently. Congratulations. I'm gonna pull it out, which is, you said mid thirties, which means that's seven years without singing. 

[00:05:26] Gillyanne: Mm-hmm. 

[00:05:27] Jeremy: That's a long time, particularly at that age and at that point of development of a singer. That's a long time. So there was some stuff going on 

[00:05:35] Gillyanne: there. There was and as I said before, and I've always said it was being a teacher that kept me going, first of all, all because. I knew exactly what it was like to feel you couldn't make a sound.

[00:05:47] Gillyanne: And for anyone out there who listens, 'cause I've had this and I think other teachers have had it. Oh, she had a voice problem. She shouldn't be teaching. Exact opposite. Mm-hmm. If you are a voice problem survivor 

[00:06:02] Jeremy: mm-hmm. 

[00:06:03] Gillyanne: You are gonna be a great teacher. 

[00:06:06] Jeremy: Mm-hmm. Okay. 

[00:06:08] Gillyanne: Or you can be a great teacher.

[00:06:09] Gillyanne: I 

[00:06:09] Jeremy: was gonna say. Okay. Yeah. So that was number one, number two. 

[00:06:13] Gillyanne: Yes. 

[00:06:14] Jeremy: You talked about a happy ending. Yes. So did the happy ending involve getting back to performing? 

[00:06:20] Gillyanne: There's a step along the way. Okay. Which was, yes, I did get back, I did do some performing pretty much low stakes stuff, but that was fine.

[00:06:29] Gillyanne: And I got to the point where I'd done a. Lunchtime concert at some venue or other. And I was pleased with what I did. It was lovely. I had a nice frock. And I enjoyed the repertoire that I sang, and I think I did a couple more. And then I thought, do you know what? I'm not really enjoying this.

[00:06:53] Gillyanne: I do like singing. I do like rehearsing. But it's spoiling my day. 

[00:07:00] Jeremy: That's such a strong sentence. 

[00:07:03] Gillyanne: And I dunno if you remember, 'cause it was several years ago around here, when we moved here in Presteigne we met with quite a lot of musicians. It has a, its own contemporary music festival, which is actually very well known.

[00:07:17] Gillyanne: And there are a lot of, 

[00:07:19] Jeremy: a lot of musicians 

[00:07:20] Gillyanne: and artists, a lot of professional musicians around 

[00:07:21] Jeremy: here, creators around here. Yeah. Yes. 

[00:07:23] Gillyanne: And a kind colleague asked me to sing something one night after I'd had about three glasses of wine. And it was Wagner, wasn't it? It was, I was sight reading. One of the Wesendonck Lieder and, he was quite enthralled. And I think, I dug into my inner lieder singer and of course Jeremy was there playing for me and he'd played for me many times and I had a lovely time. But I did not enjoy doing it in a little lecture plus examples session that he gave. So sorry, I didn't enjoy it.

[00:07:56] Gillyanne: And then later on when someone asked me to sing some a new piece, I think, 'cause we get lots of new pieces written around here, we have composer groups. And I looked at it and I said to Jeremy, I could do it, but it's gonna spoil my week. 

[00:08:13] Jeremy: I think that's really Yeah. Powerful. Mm-hmm. When you actually realize that performing is the thing that's going to spoil your week instead of peak it.

[00:08:21] Gillyanne: Yeah. 

[00:08:22] Jeremy: I think that's really powerful and I think it's a very, I don't think it's talked about. I think in order to be a quotes musician or a quotes professional singer or whatever, you have to either have had a stonking performing career or you have to be still performing. And I think it's really interesting when you come to the conclusion that performing ruins your week.

[00:08:47] Jeremy: Just so that we are clear on this, it's the exact opposite for me. I love performing, so that's fine. But there's no problem when you go, this is not what I do. This is not who I am. This does not float my boat. 

[00:09:00] Gillyanne: Yeah. And I think it's really important having a love of singing doesn't require that you love performance.

[00:09:08] Jeremy: Mm-hmm. 

[00:09:08] Gillyanne: And actually, if you confuse those two things as a singer, and remember, those of us who are singers, we're singers inside always. Whether we perform in public or not. If you confuse those issues, I think it can cause an enormous lot of harm. 

[00:09:25] Jeremy: Me too. 

[00:09:26] Gillyanne: And it definitely did for me. 

[00:09:29] Jeremy: I just wanna talk about this for a, yeah for a moment.

[00:09:32] Jeremy: The business of who you are and what you do, and being able to separate those out is absolutely vital. Totally. It's also something that I feel very strongly about in my coaching sessions or in my career coaching sessions. It's we need to find out who you are. Before we decide what you do, you can sometimes do it the other way around.

[00:09:49] Jeremy: You do something and then you discover something about yourself that you didn't realize. And that's also fine. But I think the idea that, for me, it comes down to what do you express yourself best in? What medium do you express yourself best in? And if you are a singer, you express yourself best in your voice.

[00:10:08] Gillyanne: Mm-hmm. 

[00:10:08] Jeremy: You do not have to do that in public. You can do it in private. By all means, book a session with a pianist and sing because that's what you do. And that's one of the ways that you, I mean, I know it's for Gillyanne, it's one of the ways that she finds her way into music. If somebody is doing a song in a coaching session that both of us are doing, and we don't know the song. I will read it because I'm so used to reading it as a pianist. And Gillyanne must sing it. 

[00:10:32] Gillyanne: Mm-hmm. 

[00:10:33] Jeremy: And it's the way that you find yourself into the material, it's the way you understand it and learn it and get into the depth of it rather than just the surface. Oh, this note goes here and that note goes there.

[00:10:44] Jeremy: I think that once you understand the things that work for you, then you do everything in your power to make sure that those things are in your life, and then you can look around and go, I don't need that bit anymore. 

[00:10:59] Gillyanne: Mm-hmm. So I think the key thing is if you stop performing, it doesn't mean that something is wrong with you.

[00:11:08] Jeremy: Mm-hmm. 

[00:11:09] Gillyanne: If you make that choice, it's actually about agency and redefining what. Success is success as a musician. I am a musician, I'm a singer, I'm a musician who sings music. And I think that's super important. And we had quite a lot of people contacting us, didn't we? And Yes. And sharing their own stories about this.

[00:11:33] Jeremy: Yes. 

[00:11:33] Gillyanne: So there's something else actually I'd quite like the listeners to think about, which is. As a musician or singer, what would your happy ending look like if it didn't involve proving anything to anyone? 

[00:11:49] Jeremy: That's such a great question. Who do you have to prove to, to be happy

[00:11:58] Gillyanne: and. Speaking of this whole experience became a turning point. So I spoke earlier about, yes, there was grief and there was pain at the time. Considerable pain. Pain and fear and distress. But it was a really powerful turning point for me because it took me into a direction that I had not expected.

[00:12:19] Gillyanne: And what I found at the point when I realized actually it's spoiling my day, I had also realized that I loved teaching and that I looked forward to going into the drama school and teaching. And it gave me so much satisfaction and so much joy. And then of course, there's this interesting irony that as my teaching career moved forward, performance didn't go away, it just changed shape.

[00:12:49] Gillyanne: So I started, first of all, I was working in group situations and if you are a teacher work, working in a group situation, remember I was working with actors. There is a sense in which you are guiding and doing singing leadership. It's not exactly performative in that sense, but you are standing up in front of people, and I think I've said in previous episodes, let me tell you that a bunch of postgraduate actors can give you a hard time. If you don't know what you're doing, they will challenge you. 

[00:13:19] Jeremy: No bullshit. 

[00:13:20] Gillyanne: Mm-hmm. And I also worked with adult education, third age singers people who would be very experienced in their professional fields.

[00:13:31] Gillyanne: And again, my job was to guide and lead them. And, sometimes they would challenge me as well, and you have to be prepared for that. And then of course, what happened beyond that was beginning to stand up in front of people and run training courses. Now, I've gotta tell you, I was sh scared doing a public training course with a room of a hundred people in it, even if I wasn't doing it alone.

[00:14:01] Gillyanne: Really scared. But the thing was, at that point, my desire to transmit, to share learning with other people was so strong that I went through it. So that was definitely a case of feel the fear and do it anyway. what then happened was that I began, and it took quite a while, to recognize the sense of success now, sort of going beyond survival.

[00:14:34] Gillyanne: That went well. I feel good about that as well as the survival part, and once you've had that experience, which is a nervous system experience that. Yes, you were scared, you thought the lion were about to eat you. And trust me, a bunch of singing teachers in a room can feel a little bit like that. I'm sure anyone who's been in that position knows because they feel vulnerable, because they put themselves in a learning situation.

[00:15:02] Gillyanne: And that is always challenging for someone who is working professionally in their field. So I do want to acknowledge that. You survived that and then you realize that you did well also and you begin to get, it's almost like a back catalogue of it was okay, I survived. And then the next time you feel nervous, you able to go it was okay. I survived. And there's something else that I want to talk about as well, because of course I became a researcher and so this was a new arena, a new set of lions. You are standing up and you're talking about your research. And I remember very clearly my very first research presentation not long after I'd started my PhD and I'd got my PowerPoint, I'd got my data key ready or whatever it was in those days, might have even been a CD.

[00:16:03] Gillyanne: And I went up to the front and thank goodness a colleague of mine was there who was dealing with the tech. I felt like I was swimming underwater. I was so scared because there were a number of very high ranking voice scientists in there, and my supervisor and I was not used to working in that field.

[00:16:29] Gillyanne: I couldn't even put my data key in the laptop. My hands were shaking so much. And I got to the first slide and we listened to the singer that I was giving an, an example of and I began to connect with the audience. And this is the key thing, and I want you to talk about this, Jeremy, it's so important.

[00:16:50] Gillyanne: Yeah. It's the thing I learned from doing training courses with groups and the thing that I learned even from something like a formal presentation. Somehow you connect with the audience and that gives you the freedom. This is the social engagement system that Franka talks about. I think this was the missing thing probably for me as a performer that I hadn't found a way to use my social engagement system. As I morphed and performance went into a different area, I began to use it and to get joy and satisfaction.

[00:17:32] Jeremy: Okay. Picking up on, whoa, on several things here. First of all, Franka is Franka van Essen Who is running a polyvagal theory course for performance with us, and I think we, I think it's either just coming up when this episode goes out or it's just happened. Yes. But we will have a replay. So if you weren't there at the time, you can get the replay.

[00:17:51] Gillyanne: It'll be in the show notes as well, won't it? 

[00:17:53] Jeremy: It'll be in the show notes. Yeah. Yes. Also the whole business of performing and transforming your performance skills into another area. This is all about having transferrable skills and as a performer or as a singer, you have an enormous load of transferrable skills, which you may not even recognize, particularly if you have the opinion that as a singer, you must be a performer or you are dead.

[00:18:19] Jeremy: Or you must be a performer or you're a failure. 

[00:18:21] Gillyanne: You haven't made it. 

[00:18:22] Jeremy: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think what's so fascinating about transferrable skills is once you recognize what they are, then you transfer them because that's normal and natural. Once you know what you can do, you carry on doing it.

[00:18:34] Jeremy: And there are a number of things that you transferred into presentation. I've seen you do them. So singers have a sense of timing, they have a sense of audience, they have a sense of presentation, they have projection, they have structure. So if you are planning a program, you know about structure, you know about highs and lows, you know about tension and release.

[00:18:54] Jeremy: There's all sorts of things that you do as a singer that you may or may not realize are very powerful tools to transfer to something else. So one of the things I love doing in a career coaching session is to find out what people do and the skills that they have that they don't even recognize. 

[00:19:13] Gillyanne: That's really nice, Jeremy.

[00:19:16] Jeremy: Oh just a question. Mm-hmm. Question for the listeners or viewers. When you are performing, where are you performing? Even if you don't call it performing, can you recognize the moments where you perform? We are doing it now. A podcast is a performance. Even if it sounds like a conversation, it's still a performance.

[00:19:35] Jeremy: And any podcast that you see there is a very slightly heightened sense of energy. Yeah. Otherwise it would be so boring you'd all switch off. So that a, a podcast is a performance. Where do you feel you perform? And then the next question is, do you feel the need to perform even if you don't?

[00:19:57] Gillyanne: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:00] Gillyanne: And again, this is something we'd love to hear from you. Can we just talk a little bit, Jeremy, about the difference between singing rehearsal, and performance? Yeah. And one of the things I've been learning as I've been finding out about polyvagal theory and how we apply it in the context of singing learning and singing performance is that they're actually different nervous system jobs.

[00:20:26] Gillyanne: And I think this is something that's really important to be on our radar. So I'm wondering what it is in our culture of performance, and I think. Our culture of singing, let's say that a public performance is somehow the validation of you as a singer. And I don't think that's just in the classical arena. I think it's, I think it's everywhere. 

[00:20:53] Jeremy: When you say to somebody who doesn't know you, I'm a singer, often their first question is, oh, great. Can you sing something for me? 

[00:20:59] Gillyanne: Yeah. Or Where do you sing?

[00:21:00] Jeremy: And it's prove it. 

[00:21:02] Gillyanne: Yeah. Yeah. I think particularly in our conservatoires and in higher education and maybe in our, you know, the culture of the One-to-One studio, there's this sense of the performance as being the apex.

[00:21:15] Gillyanne: And I think this is also absorbed. 'cause you've just talked about when you say to someone, I'm a singer I think this is actually absorbed in the the audience in the listeners. So it's a general thing as well. And we see that, don't we in some of these 

[00:21:29] Jeremy: Oh, the big television competitions.

[00:21:31] Jeremy: Reality TV shows. Yeah. Yes. I'm going to bring in Melissa Forbes 

[00:21:36] Gillyanne: Yes. 

[00:21:36] Jeremy: Right now. Mm-hmm. Because Melissa is 

[00:21:39] Gillyanne: not exactly in the room everyone, but 

[00:21:40] Jeremy: really strong on this. And we had a such a great couple of episodes. This is season 11, episodes 12 and 13, and it's particularly episode 13, which was called Stop Chasing Perfection, Start Singing for Connection, where she talks about. Whether singing is performative or not. Mm-hmm. And the whole idea of singing, training, being so geared to, to performative, and that there are many other ways of using singing and using communication and using connection that are not necessarily performative.

[00:22:13] Jeremy: So if you haven't listened to that episode already, it's a really good one. Season 11, episode 13. 

[00:22:19] Gillyanne: Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:22:20] Jeremy: Okay, so the difference between rehearsal and performance has got to be the audience. This is the biggest difference. And the question is, what role does the audience take? What does the audience bring with them?

[00:22:34] Jeremy: And it's a question that you ask yourself as a performer, what does the audience bring? And if you see the audience as some sort of lion that you need to tame. That's always gonna be a challenging situation. The audience brings its own energy and you never know what that energy is gonna be because the audience is built up of individuals coming together to be a group that witnesses something.

[00:22:57] Jeremy: Mm-hmm. And they're not just witnessing, they're actually taking part in even at its most basic level, an audience will create an atmosphere. And you sing into or with, or against or ignore that atmosphere. So there's already something that an audience brings, which is entirely different every show, every night. I've done long runs, I've done 124 performances of a show where the audience was different every night. I did five months on Les Miserables in the tour where we actually, I know I've said this before, but it's such a great thing. We used to time the standing ovation at the end, and if it was more than three seconds long, it was a bad show.

[00:23:43] Jeremy: And if sometimes it was 11 seconds. Every night we got a standing ovation. But we started to time the feel of it. And it's really interesting when, as a performer, when you play with that energy, when you acknowledge and accept and run with it, or when you try to fight it or when you try to tame it or when you try to do something with it, I think it's a big mistake.

[00:24:06] Jeremy: So there's lots of and I may have said this one as well. I have worked with Hatstand Opera for 20 something years and they used to give me a solo song, which is called, I Want to Sing In Opera. Comedy song.

[00:24:19] Gillyanne: Party piece.

[00:24:19] Jeremy: Party piece. And, I discovered one day that I was so tired and annoyed and something had gone on backstage that it's like with the setting or whatever, and I was just annoyed.

[00:24:30] Jeremy: And I decided one day just to start the song annoyed. I started it in exactly the emotion that I was feeling and within two lines, first of all, you could feel the audience sit up 'cause it's like. oh, this is unusual. What's going on? And within two lines, I was back into the song in the way that I would normally have sung it, but I felt so much better about it, so I wasn't trying to fight my own emotions.

[00:24:53] Jeremy: And I did that every night from then on, it's whatever emotion I was in, I would start the opening line in that emotion and it was absolutely fascinating. Mm-hmm. It zinged every night and it was a sort of song where you could do that. The opening line was a couple of spoken sung lines.

[00:25:10] Jeremy: So you could do it in what, whatever way you wanted. But I think it's really interesting when you also acknowledge your own emotional state at the moment you start to sing a song. 

[00:25:22] Gillyanne: I was just thinking, from a practical point of view if people are planning gigs or concerts. To really think about what are your options for the first number that you're going to do not to fix it, but to give yourself several options depending on how you're feeling that day.

[00:25:42] Gillyanne: Yep. What you are picking up from the audience. And one of the things that, because that's gonna help you to to go through you, you don't have to, you often say, don't you, it's okay to be crap for three minutes. 

[00:25:54] Jeremy: 10. 

[00:25:54] Gillyanne: Oh, it's 

[00:25:55] Jeremy: 10, 10, 10 minutes. It's always 10 minutes. 

[00:25:56] Gillyanne: Gosh, I wish I'd known that one.

[00:25:58] Gillyanne: I would say 

[00:25:58] Jeremy: crap for 10 minutes, right? 

[00:25:59] Jeremy: The, as long as it's not at the end it can be anywhere in the show, but if you're crap at the end, then the audience don't applaud. It's the thing about being crap for 10 minutes is a really fascinating sort of mental jump because you go, ah, this isn't going very well.

[00:26:14] Jeremy: Mm-hmm. Ah, this must be my 10 minutes. That's fine. And you relax. Which is really counterintuitive because there you are being crap and you relax and let go. And what usually happens is that you get back into what you're doing.

[00:26:26] Jeremy: I just wanna pick up. Something that you said about having several options.

[00:26:31] Jeremy: One of the things, one of the very, very clever things that the Hatstand people did, and this is Kirsty Young, shout out to Kirsty and Toni, that they planned the program in sections. And so each section had a mood, or each section had a purpose. And if the audience wasn't reacting in the way that they were comfortable with, or they knew something had to happen, they would just change the section and put something else in and then go back to the program again. There was one really memorable moment where we started the opening number and then it was a tenor solo, so the two girls went off and Toni came back on with. An entirely new folder of music. She said this, we know this program's not gonna work.

[00:27:14] Jeremy: So we're doing an entirely different program. Here you go. And because I know the music so well, I know all of that repertoire they have a repertoire of something like 700 pieces that they actually sing. 

[00:27:25] Gillyanne: And you've all worked together. 

[00:27:26] Jeremy: We've worked for so long together. I went, oh yeah, fine. Yeah. And we just played an entirely different program.

[00:27:31] Jeremy: If you can do that, if you can change the music, great. If you have to sing the same stuff, then I go with sing it in the way that you feel. You can always morph that into the story. You can always start singing it in the way that you feel, and then morph back into the character's emotions at that moment.

[00:27:47] Jeremy: There's all sorts of little bits of control that you can take, and this is, it's a sort of sense of control that goes, now I'm on the wavelength. You are the skilled person in this area. You are the skilled person in the room when you are singing. Or playing, and the audience is the unskilled person. But they want you to excel because they want a good time.

[00:28:09] Gillyanne: Yeah. 

[00:28:10] Jeremy: And so if you are the skilled person, you can change things very slightly and make it work for you and for them. And then everyone has a good time. There's a sort of sense of responsibility, which is a really interesting one, which is you don't have to follow it slavishly, what's on the page, you are there, you are performing.

[00:28:29] Jeremy: It's your goal, it's your thing. So if you wanna change a very small part of it, you can.

[00:28:35] Gillyanne: Shock horror. I know. So here's something listeners might want to think about. What does your nervous system expect will happen when you perform? And where does that come from? 

[00:28:51] Jeremy: It's such a great question.

[00:28:52] Gillyanne: Mm-hmm. 

[00:28:52] Jeremy: And it is the opportunity to bring in the course that we're running, which is Polyvagal Theory For Performance because Franka is going to take us through a whole load of techniques on finding out what you do, finding out what your nervous system does, and also how to change it, and just really specific stuff.

[00:29:11] Jeremy: Yeah. That you can use at any moment, and you can use it in the studio as well. You can use it. Mm-hmm. Of course with your students can use it with you, which is hilarious. Mm-hmm. There are all sorts of things that you can do, which enable you to take a small amount of control over a situation that you are feeling uncomfortable with.

[00:29:28] Gillyanne: Do you know what? This feels like a good moment to wrap, to put this to bed. What do you think?

[00:29:33] Jeremy: I agree.

[00:29:34] Gillyanne: Yeah, but before we go, we would love to have more respondents to the Master Apprentice survey. It's still ongoing. Please let us hear your voice. 

[00:29:46] Jeremy: We'll put the link in the show notes for you. We'll see you soon.

[00:29:50] Jeremy: Bye. Bye.

[00:29:52] Jingle: This is a voice, a podcast with Dr Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher. This Is A Voice