The Practice Parlour is a conversation series with world-class artists about the practices that shape their lives - both onstage and off. It is for curious artists and arts lovers, alike, who are crafting aligned and meaningful lives of purpose through their daily practices.
Abby Halpin of Forte Performance and Physical Therapy explains why approaching art from an athletic perspective with the help of a physical therapist can help you to conquer your technical challenges.
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(:00) Hello, and welcome to The Practice Parlour. I am your host, Gina Morgano and today I'm here with Abby Halpin of Forte Performance and Physical Therapy. Abby's practice is focused on helping singers and instrumentalists learn how to better use their body and coordinate their movement patterns. I'm so excited to have you here today Abby, to give your unique perspective on the body. Thanks for being here!
ABBY HALPIN:
(:55) Thank you so much for having me!
GINA MORGANO:
(:58) Could you please share about your journey into physical therapy, but especially why for singers and instrumentalists?
ABBY HALPIN:
(1:07) Sure! I grew up playing all the sports and all the musical instruments. Specifically piano, voice, and I did a little stint with the cello. Throughout my high school years, I was positive I was going to audition to go to music school, basically get a performance and musical education or music education degree, and somehow I just like flipped a 180 and was like, actually, I want to just focus on sports. And I still had this idea that they were, for some reason, separate. It was just a very teenager kind of view of myself. So picking professions when you're a teenager is kind of tough. So I ended up going to physical therapy school, which was fantastic. I spent many years working in kind of typical outpatient physical therapy clinics. You know, people with low back pain, runners with foot pain, just kind of the whole gamut and ended up wanting to get out of the insurance world. That was my initial launch to switch gears and created my own practice and named it Forte Performance and Physical Therapy because it kind of encapsulated that like strength of physical movement, and of course, forte, trying to be clever. With my history of being a musician myself, the musicians just kept showing up. I mean it started with just simple things like I didn't call things practices and games. It just kind of like spoke the language. I had one kind of pivotal moment working with a singer. She came to me with hip pain, and she had sprained her ankle years back and spent a period of time in the boot, or in a walking boot, and was having hip pain. And we weren't really talking much about singing, although I mean we were talking about it in a social manner, but not much in her medical history. And she had been preparing to do a recital primarily of art songs, and was just really struggling and found herself feeling flat. She didn't she didn't feel like she had a lot of like nuance in her sound. She was just kind of feeling like, what is the hurdle that I'm not getting over and we did some things with pelvic floor breathing, diaphragm and other things related to her hip, unrelated to singing. She texted me in like three days and was like, what did we do? This is magical. I've never sung like this. That was a few years ago now and it's just kind of taken off since then, where I've just shifted my viewpoint to everything that I have known to work with athletes can be pointed in the direction of singers as well. It's just been so wonderful for me personally to integrate all of these parts of myself into my business, but it's also been wonderful to give back to this community that I've been a part of and has given me so much for so much of my life.
GINA MORGANO:
(4:11) This is amazing. I'm so excited to chat with you. I have so many questions and thoughts swirling around my mind. The first is just in response to what you said about working on the hip and physical therapy for your hip. I recorded an earlier episode of The Practice Parlour with my physical therapist Layne Gable, who specializes in pelvic floor rehabilitation and therapy. I remember going to her and, again I didn't go for singing purposes, but I remember saying to her, Oh, that's what it feels like to take a low breath. I didn't realize all this time that I was not breathing, I won't say properly, but breathing to my fullest potential or capacity or I felt like I didn't know how to breathe. Like for the first time, I knew what it felt like to take a low, deep breath. It was amazing to have that realization, and what that did to my singing. And that was just, you know, one little example, but I'm currently in PT for whiplash and for my neck, and, you know, things release, and all of a sudden, I feel my sinuses are like opening up and my resonance is better. Everything really is connected. It's pretty incredible.
ABBY HALPIN:
(5:30)Absolutely, I feel like my role with singers is to basically help them access, power of air, you know? I don't want to do anything up here and articulators and you know, I mean, I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah good. Talk to your SLP. Talk to your voice teacher. But if I can create easier movement elsewhere in the body, that makes airflow, that's a victory for me.
GINA MORGANO:
(5:54) Yes that's huge.
ABBY HALPIN:
(5:56) It sounds like that's your experience with your pelvic health PT.
GINA MORGANO:
(5:59) For sure. And I mean, that is such a huge part of singing is, you know, the power that comes from the air and if that's blocked, it's really hard to get that beautiful flow that we're after. So you mentioned your athletic approach and oftentimes, singers are referred to as athletes. My own voice teacher, Andrew Byrne, his book is called The Singing Athlete. But also, traditionally in society, the arts and sports tend to be on opposite sides of the spectrum, or at least considered that way. Like you're either a sports person, or you're an arts person. And, of course, there's so many people who love both and are good at both and I don't think we need to separate them. But traditionally, it has been separated. And I think sometimes the word athlete for singers or musicians, for artists can be a little bit triggering. I mean I think of myself and all of the times I was a benchwarmer or I was picked last for the team or I was the slowest runner. So it really took a long time for me to consider myself a singing athlete and the concept of actually considering myself an athlete, just period an athlete. That's still hard to wrap my brain around sometimes. Could you elaborate more on your athletic approach and why you consider artists to be athletes?
ABBY HALPIN:
(7:38) Oh, absolutely. And you don't have to tell me. I mean, I remember warming up for my own soccer game, and then running over and singing the national anthem for it. And I'd have to be like, catching my breath, on the side because now I'm all warm, ready for soccer. So I felt like I had to go back and forth and switch brains, which was a real disservice because I think that all of the sports that I did served me as a musician, and vice versa, and so had we as a culture come up with language to morph them together earlier, I think we all would be better off. The reason that I think that singers should be called athletes and my hope that singers can be comfortable being called athletes, is because athletes train for something sport specific, activity specific. We train skills, we train stamina, we train power, agility, I mean, you could then pick all those terms up and dump it on a soccer field, you can pick it all up and dump it on a music score. So I think the specificity of the training, and then also just the physical toll it takes on us, we need to be very aware of our recovery. A lot of people use the word overtraining, I like the term under recovery, because I'm a person who wants to be doing more all the time and so under recovery makes me think, Oh, well, I need to recover more rather than I need to train less. That feels bad, but everybody's personality is different. So I like that there's a term for whatever suits people better. So all of these terms are applicable to musicians and all of these concepts are, and I think it's really important that we think about the load placed on our body both physically, simply from standing or sitting for long periods of time. Holding music. I had an Instagram message a little while ago, where somebody said, Oh my gosh, my elbow, because she had been holding a giant score for, I think, I can't remember what her last performance was. I think two and a half hours. So that's an endurance moment. And then also singers are often dancers or something else performance like and so they need to be able to work their movement system in a way that like allows them to have the amount of load to keep going for long periods of time. Musicians also don't have offseasons as much. So it's a longer period of time that you're training for.
GINA MORGANO:
(10:11) Yes, you made so many great points. So the first thing I want to touch on is this idea of recovery and under recovering. That's brilliant. Oftentimes, you know, someone might say, well, you have to warm up your voice, but you also have to cool it down. Sometimes we're singing long rehearsals, and then we have a performance and then we have to go practice music for something else. And it can be really easy to overdo it. But something I noticed in my own life, is that if I'm intentional about my breaks, then I often am able to have more endurance and more stamina. So I love that idea of focusing on the recovery. The other thing that you mentioned, is the load that we place on our bodies. It is so physical. If you are in an opera or a musical or something that is being staged, that is very physical. If you are playing in an orchestra, even if you are just singing in the choir, I oftentimes, you know, as I said, I'm dealing with whiplash, it affects my shoulder and just like holding the music. I'm always rolling out my shoulder and rubbing it. That's hard. That's hard work and that is athletic work, even though we're just standing there. The other thing that you mentioned are all of the transferable skills. The thing that stood out to me is, yes, in this conversation, we are talking about our bodies and our physique and our movement. However, there are also so many mental transferrable skills. The skills of discipline and communication and I mean, we could go on and on and on about that, but those could also be picked up from the world of sport into the world of art and vice versa. So the parallels really are plentiful.
ABBY HALPIN:
(12:31) Absolutely.
GINA MORGANO:
(12:34) Could you elaborate more on training your body as an athlete, whether it be warming up, cooling down, being in the thick of it? What issues do you see and how can artists maybe take a new approach?
ABBY HALPIN:
(12:55) Hmm. I think a major issue that I see over and over again, is that people are told to hold back from doing things that they may otherwise want to do just as a human being, because they don't want to change their aesthetic, put too much load on their voices. The biggest thing that I hear is strength training, where people are told not to lift heavy weights, or do some kind of more involved strength training routine, because there will be some negative ramifications. That certainly could be true. But I think if taught well, the pros drastically outweigh the cons. Someone learning how to deadlift and breathe at the same time means that their breathing system can handle higher amounts of load. That means if you have to like land from a jump while you're dancing on stage, you can tolerate more load. I think this this idea of resilience building is important for training, outside of like music specific training.
GINA MORGANO:
(14:04) That's fascinating. Again, we often like I'll think of the mental load and the mental toll but the literal physical load, that is such a great point. Aspirational, I should do this more, but I remember hearing that Beyonce used to run and sing at the same time to train. I know a lot of singers will do that. They'll get on the treadmill and sing their songs and that really does, it builds up endurance and you have to be very intentional, mindful to keep your throat open and as you're breathing. So there really are so many pros to athletic training.
ABBY HALPIN:
(14:45) That's a great example of the specificity of her training. Her shows are insane. She has to be dancing for such a long time and singing at the same time so either she decided this for herself or she has some awesome team or you know, advisor who's saying, hey, you need to be at a very high cardio level and being able to make gorgeous sound at the same time. So you're gonna have to practice that specifically. I think that's great.
GINA MORGANO:
(15:11) Yes. Now I know you are very passionate about the breath and helping artists with the breath. Can you go into that a bit more, please?
ABBY HALPIN:
(15:19) Yeah, absolutely. I think that stems from how often I hear mixed messages from many, or I should say, how often I hear a singer getting so many different messages from so many different places. And then they're kind of left with the like, "but what's real" kind of feeling. I hear a lot of people like, Okay, how does breathing work really? What really happens? It always starts with some kind of cue to help someone feel something specific and then it trickles down through generations or through people and it turns into an absolute truth. So for me, I remember learning like noble sternum, you know, when I was, I don't know, 13, or something like that. And really, that comes from maybe we shouldn't pull our shoulders up to our ears and drop them back down and like heaving every time we breathe. But it's turned into can I hold my chest up high for the entirety of every time I sing, which is just kind of an impossible feat, and more work than it needs to be. So the reason why I feel so strongly about it is that I just want to peel back all the stuff that people have learned over the years, and get them back to how they would breath had they not learned that and just kind of lessen the workload. Let's not make you think about breathing at all. Let's just make sure that you can move air in and out and it's enough to make you do the job well. After that focus on your musicality, and communicating with your audience and all the other things that somebody else is going to teach you.
GINA MORGANO:
(16:52) It's so true, even as a voice teacher, oftentimes with my students, you know, we'll be talking about the breath and, you know, support, I put that in quotes. But we'll be talking about that and it's so easy then for them to lock up, for it to create more tension because you're focused so intently on trying to micromanage the muscles, and then you just end up locking. So then say, well, just sing, and then it just becomes so much freer.
ABBY HALPIN:
(17:22) And it sounds better.
GINA MORGANO:
(17:23) Yes, for sure. So what tips do you have for people who tend to hold excess tension, to lock up, to not get those deep breaths. Also, are there specific things that you notice from your perspective as a physical therapist,
ABBY HALPIN:
(17:42) There are definitely some patterns. I mean, everybody's got their own unique spin on things. There are definitely some patterns. The most popular thing that I see is that singers are taught to hold their ribs apart and up, and not let them go down. The downside to that position is, it's essentially locking you into an extension pattern where your mid back is kind of like arched the opposite of slumped. What that does is instead of looking — you can't puff up your chest and look up and then your eyes are looking up, you still have to look straight at the world. So you end up tipping your head down and shortening your airway and creating a more pressurized situation. So what I end up doing is basically like assessing people's habits. I've gotten away from the word posture because there's too much baggage with it. So I just call it habits — I'm sure that will change as our language changes — and try to broaden the movement vocabulary. You should be able to breathe when your chest is up, when your chest is down, when your side bent, when you're twisted off to the side, and anywhere in between because you need to be able to move, walk across the stage, potentially dance. All of these need to be true and your voice needs to stay steady. It can't depend on your body position. I'm trying to see if I'm actually answering your question. That's a pattern that I see is that like lock and load thing. Like this is right, and therefore everything else is wrong, rather than I can be good at this no matter where my body is in space.
GINA MORGANO:
(19:20) Yes. It's such a balancing act. And by that I don't mean that we are balanced but there's constant movement and buoyancy to sort of recalibrate everything because when you breathe, it's moving right? Your lungs are expanding and contracting and your diaphragm is going down and up and the whole thing. But also, I think in some ways, there is an optimal coordination, shall I say, for that most efficient airflow and so how do you balance that or how would you explain how to balance having that free pathway, but also allowing your body to be flexible?
ABBY HALPIN:
(20:08) Oh, great question. I would consider it pressure management. So if we think about the most obvious diaphragm, our respiratory diaphragm, our thoracic diaphragm, I don't need to tell you this, but goes down when when you breathe in, goes up when you breathe out. Well, if you are, say, side bent to the right, and your ribs are all like, you know, compact down on the right, that side of your diaphragm needs to be okay being more domed up than your left on that side. And then the same thing happens - up and down, they move. Air flows. Yay. The trouble comes from somebody practicing so well in one position, that then when they get out of that position, the coordination is no longer available. So specifically practicing breathing in, for me as the PT, in the positions that someone doesn't have access to, opens up all the options. So for the person who's kind of in that hyper inflated, chest up and out thing, I have them do the opposite. Breathe all of your air out, get your ribs all together, break all the rules that you think you have, and then hold that and breathe in and find all the other nooks and crannies that you might be able to breathe in, specifically the back, that's usually the limitation. And to go with that, we also have all the other diaphragms in our body, which everybody seems to have a different idea of how many there are. It's basically any layer of tissue throughout our body that separates one cavity from another. They all need to slightly go up and down to counter each other's pressure. So when our diaphragm and our thorax is going up and down, it's going to exert pressure down onto our abdomen when we breathe in. So our pelvic floor needs to be able to slightly dome down to accommodate for the shift downward in our abdominal cavity of our guts. The same thing is true at our feet, our arches need to be able to go up and down to accommodate that. The same thing is true in our palate, our tongue. There's another one called our tentorium cerebelli in our heads. All of these alternating up and down motions need to be somewhat coordinated. So that one doesn't have to do all the pressure management and therefore get tired and, you know, overloading under recovery, right. So managing that pressure, and being able to manage the pressure in all the different positions is what sets people up for success for being able to perform well, no matter what they're doing.
GINA MORGANO:
(22:39) This is so good. So I often tell my students, and I tell myself this every day, that every day, your body's a little bit different. How much sleep you got, what you ate, how you're feeling, all those things. So when we're talking about breathing and support, people always ask, well, what is support, which muscles am I supposed to engage, which muscles do I hold down, which ones do I pull in or down or up or the whole thing, right? What I try to remind myself and my students about is that since your body is different every day, you're going to have to adjust based on what you need every day. So there might be a day where you're taking all these really high breaths and then maybe that's the day that we want to think okay, like let's keep the the shoulders wide and down and back and the whole thing. But maybe there's another day where you're like really great at expanding the ribcage and then we're not getting the back or the front or whatever, right? So there's all these different angles that you can approach it from, and it's just on that day, what do you need, like what is overcompensating? And what is maybe under active so that it can all balance out? But that's not an easy answer. That's a do the detective work every single moment of every single day.
ABBY HALPIN:
(24:04) The PT answer is, well, it depends. And everybody's kind of like, no, but just give me the stretch to do you know. But it always depends. It always depends.
GINA MORGANO:
(24:13) Yes. Regarding the diaphragms, I love how you explained that. And also, I did not know that the arches of your feet were considered diaphragms. Can you talk more about the arches of your feet because I don't think I realized that they even move.
ABBY HALPIN:
(24:27) Yeah. They don't go up and down with your breath, or I guess not in that exaggerated kind of way. Like you're not expecting - breathe in and your arches lift and breathe out and your arches collapse. I'm not talking anything super dramatic like that. They do need to be able to go up and down to accommodate for the slight position change that happens when you breathe in and out. And it's not like, I mean, you might be able to see it on some people but it's not like you're sitting there going, okay, there's your feet moving. But I think what I look more closely for is the opposite. If a foot can't move, we can therefore determine that it's probably affecting something else up the line. So actually with my patient that I described at the beginning of the podcast, who had, I think she had broken her ankle and was wearing a walking boot, that foot could not pronate, that arch would not drop down at all. She was stuck on the outside of her feet and that's the inhale position, which if you're stuck in inhale, it makes it awfully hard to make sound because your air goes out, right. And that's an exaggeration, she could sing beautifully. She's not, not breathing. But the fact that on one side, her foot is up and out and on the outside of her foot meant that she had a really hard time actually like shifting onto that foot, which means that she was shifted over to the right a lot more, that diaphragm got used to being loaded — I talk about diaphragms like there are sides, because there are but — that side of the diaphragm got more trained in the exhale position because she was shifted onto it more often. And her left side got more trained in her inhale position. So she had this diaphragm that was fantastically trained in the position that it knew best, but it couldn't switch. And so it would get tired faster, she would get tired, faster.
GINA MORGANO:
(26:24)Wow, that's really interesting.
ABBY HALPIN:
(26:28) So being able to just make sure that you can wait shift, it's not like, Oh, my God, now you're broken and you can't sing. It just makes it harder. I just want to lift workload off of singers. That's all. You can sing despite whatever is going on, we have so many redundancies built into our body, thank goodness, but if we can peel back any little hindrances that we do have control over, makes it easier.
GINA MORGANO:
(26:48) Yes. I always use the metaphor of peeling back the onion. Let's say, I'm gonna use the examples that hyper breath again. Let's say you take the high breath, and then okay, we get the shoulders down, we get a nice, lower a deeper breath. Great. And now we notice, oh, the tongue is tight, and Great, okay, and now we notice, oh, you're standing on one leg, or whatever it is, right? It's like, you can kind of keep peeling back. And I do believe that certain things, perhaps make more of an impact than others. And it could be for a particular person in a particular moment. So I think part of doing that detective work as a singer, and as a teacher is to try to get to the root of it as quickly as possible to find what will make the most impact, like the most bang for your buck. But all of those layers are there and we can keep finding things and fine tuning, which is the fun of it. But also, we are never going to be perfect, we are never going to be singing the most perfectly efficient way possible. So as you said, learning how to work with your body and whatever position it is, is so important.
ABBY HALPIN:
(28:08) Absolutely. Absolutely.
GINA MORGANO:
(28:11) So do people usually come to you for regular physical therapy or for something pertaining to their singing?
ABBY HALPIN:
(28:21) The way that things are going now is it's something related to musicianship. I get a lot of referrals from voice teachers. Typically, people will come to me because hey, my voice teacher is seeing this pattern and we can't seem to break it. Like that's really what it is. It's like, is there something in somebody's medical or injury history that is maybe just impeding their ability to let go of some pattern that, the voice teacher is seeing it, or might be able to go around it sometimes, but it's just like, it keeps coming back as the same problem. That is usually when I'm called in to do a little digging.
GINA MORGANO:
(29:01) And so is it usually, I'm assuming, I feel like almost everything is this, but some type of muscular imbalance?
ABBY HALPIN:
(29:09) Yes. Yeah, I think that's a good way to say it. I think it's also often people trying too hard. And I have to come up with the language, to unpeel the layers. Like okay, so why are you doing that? What do you think that body position or that attempt or whatever somebody's doing, what do you think that is serving you for? And can we get that done in a different way?
GINA MORGANO:
(29:47) Yeah, I think, as you said, overdoing it because sometimes we make the, again air quotes, the correct movement or the correct position or whatever, like we take that nice breath, our lungs expand, our ribs come out, like we did it, we do what we're supposed to do. Okay, but now we're stuck here. Now what?
ABBY HALPIN:
(30:09) Yes, yeah. I had a client, I don't know, six months ago or so who is a musical theater teacher and a professional dancer. His pattern that he could not break was that basically his six pack muscles would not turn off, which is really common in dancers, because we're all told to pull in, pull in our abdomen. So what wasn't happening is he wasn't accessing his obliques and some of the other abdominals very easily because it was just kind of this, like I said, a lock and load situation with six pack. So I had to say, Okay, what's that doing for you and can we get your obliques to maybe create that sense of abdominal connection without you only using one part of that musculature? He came to me because he was having like cramping feelings, the way he described it was cramping feelings in my diaphragm, when he would kind of transition through some of the harder ranges of his voice. And so I basically just had to peel back that layer, like, Okay, let's get rid of that six pack strategy, and give you another one to cover for it. That way, if you have to use it, that's cool, but that's more of a dancer strategy. You know, it was just kind of one of those, like, let's give you more options. So one of this one of these strategies isn't taking over and blocking you.
GINA MORGANO:
(31:32) Yes. And you know, that's such a great point, too, is that sometimes our strengths and our weaknesses are the same thing. I was thinking as you were talking about a student of mine, actually, I've had a couple of students like this, but students who are dancers. Because they're dancers, they have great body awareness, they have great access to engaging their core. So certain things about support and breathing, like they are able to get right away, and it comes very intuitively to them. Then also, because that is such a strength, because they're used to, you know, pulling that, you know, belly button in and up, right, then they get stuck a little bit and tighten the solar plexus and things like that. So it's both a strength and a weakness at the same time. I think we all have those patterns and habits throughout our bodies like things that serve us in some ways, but because we do that all the time and sort of ignore other movement patterns, then it also becomes a weakness at the same time.
ABBY HALPIN:
(32:44) Absolutely. And I like that it's such an optimistic way of viewing things because I think, even in PT school, I was a lot of time taught like, oh, people are doing this, and it's bad. Like it was just this kind of black and white kind of description, when really it's just a compensation pattern. And I hate that term. But it's a compensation pattern that is actually helping something. And we don't need to be like, Oh, you're compensating and that's bad. Like that's not helpful. What is it covering for? Thank you for covering for that thing. And can we give you other strategies to do it, too?
GINA MORGANO:
(33:14) Yes, yes, yes. That's also I know, you said that you work more with the lower body than like the face. But something that comes to mind is jaw tension and tongue tension. And how you know that you need to, I keep using the word support, but you know that you need to manage your breath and the pressure somehow. So, oftentimes, if we're not engaging the lower muscles, the jaw and the tongue will activate because your body knows what it needs. It's just getting it in a roundabout way.
ABBY HALPIN:
(33:49) Absolutely. I love talking about jaw tension because it's always, it's so helpful. I just feel like if the jaw, like do you know, the Enneagram?
GINA MORGANO:
(33:58) Yes, I love the Enneagram
ABBY HALPIN:
(34:00) I feel like if the jaw had an Enneagram it would be a two, which is like the helper person. Like it's just so wanting to help whatever else needs it. It's kind of like, I think of it as kind of endearing. And really the jaws just almost never the actual problem.
GINA MORGANO:
(34:20) Okay, so now the new social media idea for you is to go through and assign an Enneagram number to different parts of the body. I want to be that.
ABBY HALPIN:
(34:28) That's a fantastic idea. Something's definitely the peacemaker.
GINA MORGANO:
(34:34) Yes. Funny. Okay, so, I want to hear a little bit more about posture and movement patterns for, I mean, we mostly have singers listening this but we have other artists listening to this as well. But just based on what is required of people's bodies for their craft? I'm thinking of like, pianists and their wrist or string players and the way they hold their bodies, or dancers. What are some challenges with — what did you say habits, I'm saying posture but I know you said not that word — what are some challenges that you run across with people in the way that they hold their bodies on the regular?
ABBY HALPIN:
(35:32) Hmm? Yeah, I would say a lot of singers find themselves forward on the balls of their feet or perhaps with their pelvis in front of their shoulders, or like hyper extended knees — like all these kind of go together in the same pattern, by the way. And the other one that I run into a lot is people wanting to, I would call it retract, but pull back their head in order to tuck their chin. And that's something that usually they're taught. It's that like, can you stand against the wall and touch all the parts of your body against the wall. But if your head is touching the wall, it's technically behind you because likely your body is, is narrower or thinner, or however, than your head or the other way around. Sorry. Your body is bigger, so that by the time you get your head back to the wall, you can even hear it the way I just said that, I just did it. You're creating pressure that now you have to work through that pressure, something else is gonna have to work harder. So that's another one that I see.
GINA MORGANO:
(36:35) Yes. And that's something, again, like with my students, so sometimes I'll have them do that and then they'll say like, oh, now I'm kind of tight like this. Well yes. Again, I like to think of everything on a spectrum. And so it's like, if we're on, say, the left side of the spectrum, then we need to go like, really far right, so that we can eventually get back to middle.
ABBY HALPIN:
(36:56) Absolutely, yes, absolutely. I mean, people, there's a fantastic personal trainer, who has this great social media thing, her name is Alison Tenny. And she says people are so people-y. We all just want to do everything to the max, right? We want to make like you as a voice teacher, we want to make you so proud of us as voice students. And so we're going to do the most of the head movement, because Oh, okay. She told me to do this. I'm gonna do it. And it's just like, can you do like 10%? Like, just do 10%?
GINA MORGANO:
(37:30) Yes, yes, I love the percentages. The other thing that I'm thinking about is going back to your body is different every day is like, on a given day, or in this moment, like in this moment, you need to, you know, move in this way, or let's try this. But oftentimes, students will take that to heart to mean always and forever, I have to do this to the max.
ABBY HALPIN:
(37:55) Yeah. And then it compounds. 10 years later, they're doing it to the max and each day, the max gets further on the spectrum, because they've been training it. Like if you squat 10 pounds, the next day, you can squat 20. Well, you can do the same thing with your body, like you can do it more and more, the more you do it, and it ends up being beyond the spectrum.
GINA MORGANO:
(38:12)Yes. So how would you advise artists to then keep their bodies buoyant in that way? We have to train. So how do we prevent what you just described from happening?
ABBY HALPIN:
(38:30) Oh, what a great question. My experience has been people do really well with feeling sensations, rather than trying to do movements. So rather than, get your ears over your shoulders, you could say, float the crown of your head. The result is the same, but they're not trying to move. They're just seeking a sensation. So common sensations that I use to get people to basically chill out a little bit are, can you feel your heels on the floor? Because especially the singers who are dancers, often, are not even aware of their heels. So can you just feel your heels on the floor? Or if you're sitting can you feel your sit bones in the seat? So there's this sense of groundedness. I do something called friendly hand or can you put your hand on your sternum and just like let it kind of drop slightly. I'm not saying, can we slump like we don't want to go to school today. It's more of a just sigh a little like, Okay, this feels relaxed. Then the float the crown of your head queue is another nice one as well. So something external or a sensation to seek rather than a movement to do because you can't do 200% of can you float your head? You can do 200% of can you move your head backwards?
GINA MORGANO:
(39:49) Oh, that's fascinating, like, what can we quantify and not quantify? Wow, and that brings back the artistry to it as well.
ABBY HALPIN:
(40:00)Right, absolutely. And over the years, we have learned more and more about why we move and it's rarely purposeful from a conscious way. It's more like we have sensations, and therefore our motor system does something. So if you see something scary on the right, you're either going to run to the left, or you going to look at it really fast, right? Those movements happen because of a sensory experience. So if we can create the sensory experience that therefore creates the movement without having to do it consciously, it's more readily available than, well, how far do I do it? Do you want me to lift my shoulders all the way up or do you want me to lift them all the way down? Well, why don't you just like, take a little breath out and then just stay right there.
GINA MORGANO:
(40:45) That is brilliant. I'm thinking of the word emotion and how motion is at the root of it.
ABBY HALPIN:
(40:51) Oh, I like that.
GINA MORGANO:
(40:53) And how intertwined our emotions and our motion or movement are?
ABBY HALPIN:
(40:59) Absolutely. That brings me back to like diaphragm one, which is that tentorium cerebelli and it has an effect on our fight, flight, freeze or rest and digest systems. So I mean, if we're nervous, we're in fight, flight, freeze, right? We have to be. It helps us. But that does determine how we might hold ourselves, how we might move on the stage. You know? Can we can we create a sense of calm for the audience so they're comfortable, despite our nervous system going everything's on fire and I'm scared.
GINA MORGANO:
(41:31) Yes. And I am sort of interpreting this from what you said. I'm curious if you have more of the science or the anatomy, but it seems to me then that, we know that the the primary function of the vocal folds is for survival, right? So it's not for singing, it's for survival. And so that like, fits right if we're in fight, flight, freeze, our throat is literally closing.
ABBY HALPIN:
(41:59) Yes. Yes. Absolutely. And the same thing is true with our ribcage and our diaphragm. If we're in fight, flight, freeze. We end up with chest puffed out, diaphragm is down. I mean, think the military posture, right? It signals to the world like, either I've got this or I'm scared or you know, it just gets you ready, it gets you ready to run away, gets you ready to fight. So it takes a lot of skill to be able to feel fear and appear.
GINA MORGANO:
(42:31) Yes. And I'm thinking of the skill of crying while singing. I feel like that's such an example of this. It's actually a skill to learn how to keep your throat open, keep your air flowing, all of that while emotionally, you are going to a place of tears.
ABBY HALPIN:
(42:56) Oh, yeah.
GINA MORGANO:
(42:58) And that brings up also like the line. We always talk about, with singing and acting, how far can you go? Where's that line? Because if you cross it, then your technique is going to be all out of whack, but you want to go as far to the line as you can.
ABBY HALPIN:
(43:13) Yeah, for communication purposes. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
GINA MORGANO:
(43:18) Yeah. Wow, that is very, very cool. So tell me about your practice. You are based in Vermont.
ABBY HALPIN:
(43:25) That's right. I'm primarily a virtual practice, which is super cool. I would never have guessed this for myself. I got into PT specifically because I was like, I don't want to work with computers. I just was like, I'm not gonna sit still all day. I'm just not doing it. And the pandemic threw a wrench into things like it did for everybody. And I had already been experimenting with some zoom PT for ergonomic setup with people like, okay, let's set up a camera off to the side. That was kind of already slightly happening, but, I mean, like five times. It wasn't a thing that I was super experienced with. But, at least at the beginning of the pandemic, it seemed like it brought about this time for singers that were they're, like, Okay, I'm not performing, but I can work through some of this, kind of, junk that I've been maybe putting on the back shelf and like, yeah, yeah, I gotta deal with that someday. And this was a way that I could have people sing, or even like, record themselves, sing and send it to me and then we could have a PT session virtually. So it freed up a lot of, like we can spend a lot of time doing focused work on music specific stuff. And with instrumentalists, I mean, they usually play more than one, so it's hard to like haul them all into the clinic. So they're in their practice space. The same furniture that's around them when they're practicing is there you know. So it's been really, really fun. We can create exercises and go Yeah, I see that pillow back behind you. Can you grab that okay. And then we're gonna move that chair over there and put your feet on it, you know, and we can create the exact environment that somebody needs. There's no going home and going, how am I gonna recreate that thing we just did. I don't know what we were doing. Like that doesn't exist, we break that barrier down by doing it virtually, it's pretty great. The other added bonus is that their voice teachers can come come to the session. So sometimes we've got me, their voice teacher, and the singer and we're all working together. It's really fun.
GINA MORGANO:
(45:30) That is so cool. And I'm completely fascinated by that. Wow. Okay, so I've two Parlour games. The first is called lighting the candle. What is a person, resource, organization, idea, that you would like to pass the torch to and illuminate?
ABBY HALPIN:
(45:52) I love the light the candle. That's so nice. I had kind of an amazing voice lesson myself this week and my voice teacher has — It's been really fun to see her grow over the last couple of years and change the way she's doing it in such a helpful way. Her name is Liz Frazer. She's out of Seattle. I'm doing virtual lessons with her. And she's created classes. So one week I work with her one on one and the next week I'm in a class of three other singers and we all perform for each other. And of course you find out, like, Ah we're all working on kind of the same stuff. It just like makes things a little less intimidating. I'm just so grateful for her. I feel like I have blown through some roadblocks for myself, in even just the last three months just because of the way that she's changed her studio and the way that she's doing things. And I would just like to put a giant flashlight on her.
GINA MORGANO:
(46:48) Amazing! Liz Frazer. And I love that structure. That sounds like such a great structure for a studio. Our last Parlour game is called The Parrot. If we were all your parrots, what would you teach us to say?
ABBY HALPIN:
(47:05) Oh, I love this. I would teach you all to say that movement can be a choice and having the most choices is the best. Meaning having the broadest vocabulary of movement means you have more skills and less chance for under recovery of certain things.
GINA MORGANO:
(47:32) Movement is a choice and having the most choices is the best.
ABBY HALPIN:
(47:37) Yes.
GINA MORGANO:
(47:38) Oh, that's so good. So juicy. Abby, where can people find you and your practice
ABBY HALPIN:
(47:45) I'm located in Vermont, but I work with musicians everywhere. They can find me and my website, www.forteperformancept.com or Instagram @forteperformancePT.
GINA MORGANO:
(47:56) I love that and you have a podcast too.
ABBY HALPIN:
(47:59) I do a podcast. It's called Play Life Loudly. Right now it's on Spotify. Hopefully on Apple soon.
GINA MORGANO:
(48:04) Amazing. Abby Halpin of Forte Performance and Physical Therapy, thank you so much for visiting The Practice Parlour. I feel like I just got a voice lesson. So thank you so much for that.
ABBY HALPIN:
(48:18) Thank you so much for having me. This was so fun.
GINA MORGANO:
(48:21) You're welcome. Have a beautiful day.
ABBY HALPIN:
(48:24) Thank you, you too!
LEARN MORE ABOUT ABBY:
“I am physical therapist in Vermont. My practice has grown to focus on performing arts with a lean toward singers and instrumentalists. Music, dance, and sports were all very important to me growing up and it’s been a wonderful turn of events that I get to combine all into my professional life. I was primarily a choral and musical theater singer in school, was a member of an a capella group in college and continue to study voice recreationally now. I am also a trained classical pianist. My physical therapy career just kept pivot toward musicians so I went with it! And now I provide virtual and mobile PT and coaching sessions to help musicians feel their best while performing. For singers specifically, I have found my role to be demystifying how breathing works and relieving singers from the movement patterns they have adopted that hinder them. I mostly try to get singers to stop working so hard! I am especially interested in the multiple diaphragms throughout our movement system and the role our diaphragm plays in our body positions and while walking. This knowledge allows me to help singers sing more easily by broadening their movement vocabulary and keep altered movement patterns and their injury/medical history from hindering their voice.”
Instagram: @forteperformancept
www.forteperformancept.com, https://playlifeloudly.buzzsprout.com/
IN THIS EPISODE WE TALK ABOUT:
The connection between body and voice
Singers as athletes and what singing/music requires of our bodies
How PT can help you feel better and perform better
Practices for singers to incorporate into their lives and training
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DISCLAIMER:
Gina and her guests speak from their own personal experiences, and nothing said is meant to be taken as medical advice. Please consult with your doctor and medical professionals to manage your health.
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Original music by David John Madore. To learn more about David, check out his work at http://www.madoremusic.com/
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