"Take Off Your Emotional Clothes and Sing"

There are a number of blogs circling the landing field in my mind, but this is the one that really wanted to approach today. There I am, quietly reading the Sunday paper in my favorite little quirky coffee shop, and suddenly the tears come. Impossible to stop. This is the article I was reading, excerpted below (if you're not registered, let me know, and I'll email it to you). The stage is set when Barbara Cook, one of my favorite performers, enters a Julliard performance space to give a master class to young singers.

"Take Off Your Emotional Clothes and Sing"

By Charles Isherwood

Published: December 11, 2005

Ms. Cook, who gives several master classes a year around the country, opened the session with a brief, informal speech emphasizing that the key to good singing is making a real investment of feeling in each note. "Your own humanity," she said, "is your pathway to artistry."

Using a vivid metaphor that acknowledged the scariness of the enterprise, she explained, "We have to find the courage to take off our emotional clothes." Ms. Cook elaborated on that danger in speaking of the essential fear that crawls around in most performers' hearts, an anxiety that in a curious way may also be a motivating factor in the desire to become a performer: "We feel that we're not enough, that the world doesn't want us."

The students were hiding inside the music, inside their technique, and Ms. Cook set about dragging them out and making them lay bare their own truths, even if it meant awkwardness, embarrassment and some blunt criticism - leavened, in all cases, by sincerely delivered hugs and kisses. She put forth a telling paradox: "The place that seems most dangerous is exactly where safety lies." In other words, self-exposure and the abandonment of technical propriety, scary as it was, was the surest, the best, maybe the only way to communicate with an audience.

But the most arresting moment came when a svelte redhead named Ariana Wyatt came onstage. Radiating charm and confidence, she began to sing a little-known Gershwin song called "In the Mandarin's Orchard Garden," about a misfit flower. Ms. Cook clearly wanted to find the woman behind the poise. She tried the same techniques she'd used on the others, but still Ms. Wyatt seemed intent on delivering a perfectly manicured performance that was just what Ms. Cook didn't want to hear.

As frustration mounted on both sides, Ms. Cook finally turned to face her student and said, with real sincerity: "You are a beautiful young woman. You have a beautiful voice. You don't have to prove it to anyone." Ms. Wyatt nodded, and a couple of tears ran down her cheeks.

I'm afraid those words are paraphrased. The pen stopped moving when the heart stood still. Although it was not part of a performance, the moment may well linger as one of the most moving things I've witnessed in a theater. Ms. Cook dabbed the tears away, then watched a little dumbstruck as her student insisted on leaving the stage for a moment to gather herself. "This is a first," she said a little sheepishly.

And what had happened? It's hard to say. Maybe, in the unlikeliest of contexts - on a public stage - two people made a brief but meaningful connection. Certainly, an established artist gave a small gift of assurance - of love, even - to an unformed one. The serenity of age looked back at the insecurity of youth, which marshals technique and posturing to defend itself, and said, try to let it go. You don't need it. You are enough.
Ms. Wyatt returned to the stage, determined, and sat down, and sang. She was still riven with emotion, maybe a little too much. Ms. Cook asked her how it went. It was harder to sing this way, Ms. Wyatt confessed. Ms. Cook said it would get easier. The audience applauded her enthusiastically, wanting to honor both the progress she'd made and the discomfort she'd endured to get there.

When performers first step onstage, they may be looking for validation, for approbation in the form of nourishing applause. But the lesson Ms. Cook came to teach was that artists achieve their peak when they learn to stop proving themselves and simply, to borrow the Shakespearean phrase, let be. It's their humanity we respond to in the end, their ability to strip away the self-consciousness that locks us inside ourselves, and reveal the stuff that really boils in our souls.