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‘Tell Me A Story’ Workshop 27 August 2016 Blog By Liz

Every month, our devoted teachers, Sheena and Karen, deliver a workshop focussed on specific aspects of singing. This can be how to smooth over the change between your high notes and low notes, or breath control, for example (all of which I have unfortunately missed), but this one was about the importance of story-telling – singing like you mean it.

In the years before there were newspapers etc., word of what was happening in the world was brought to people by word of mouth, often in song, presumably for ease of remembering but also as a way of having a dig at high heejins without getting your head chopped off. It therefore mattered that the content of the song was sung as “true.” This remains important today – we were asked to think, which was the better singer, the person who had a lovely voice or the person who caught your emotions and hooked you into the song? To help us find the answer, Sheena sang her very own version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” as if it were a shopping list (with sincere apologies to LC):

I went to Morrison’s* today

To see what bargains were on display

But you don’t really care for mushrooms do you?

I picked up some eggs and flour and bread

And thought I’d make a cake instead

The chocolate was half price

Hallelujah

(*Other supermarkets and food outlets are available!)

We then looked at what makes a performance genuine. Karen told us the story of when she was wee, how she liked experimenting with sound, so tried out tap dancing on the glass-topped coffee table, with predictable results – she still has the scars, physical and mental (her mum’s response was “How much do you think it will cost to mend that table!”). We were divided into groups of three, and asked to come up with our own stories – then pick one story which was told by all the members of the group as if it had happened to them. The rest of us had to try to spot whose story it really was. The stories were brilliant – someone teasing a large crab in a rock pool and getting nipped, and is frightened of crabs to this day; someone shutting her finger in the crack of the bathroom door out of curiosity and having to go to hospital, still has the scar; someone playing ‘dare-ies’ running up the chicken poo midden, which was crusty at the edges but softer in the middle… The things that identified the true stories’ owners were things like the look of remembered pain, actions reliving the event, and the words used, which rang true. Mental note to take this all on board.

So we put it to the test. We were taught Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen,” (…ugly duckling girls like me…) and tried to look as sad and forlorn and sincere as we could. If we were professional singers, we would, after all, have to sing whatever we were told, whether we liked it or not (said Karen). But although a lovely melody, it did feel a little downbeat. So, not to end on a low note, we also sang Abba’s “Mama Mia,” complete with spontaneous “doot-doot-doo dut-dut doo”’s between the lines.

Did we look like we meant it? Were we putting it across? Would anyone have believed us? I don’t know, I was just gie-ing it laldy!

On the way home, I wondered about “Oh for the wings, for the wings of a dove…” and possible actions. That’s the thing with this group, you always come away uplifted and inspired.