[Winter table of contents/ Dorothy Ornest / UMass Mag Home Page]
"'Sorry Miss Ornest, I can't sing the lyrics, I'm thinking about my ankles.'" Larry Picard '79 was role-playing -- jokingly suggesting how participants in his traveling workshop "The Singing Body" might respond to their professor's critique.
The session Picard conducted one Thursday last fall was aimed at making the assembled singers, most of them students in Dorothy Ornest's Opera Workshop, aware of their bodies. "Close your eyes," he told the group gathered on the stage of Bezanson Recital Hall. "Where is your head? On the next class? How does your neck feel? Relaxed? How about your ankles?"
As Picard directs a group in increasingly complex execises , he always asks, "What does it feel like?" During one drill, participants walk around confronting other walkers. One student in the Umass group says the confrontation makes him lose fluidity of motion. Picard replies with a question: "When a stream encounters a rock, does it become less fluid?" His basso is both humorous and serious, fluid but not the least confrontational.
Now the students start creating their own vocal/movement pieces. Picard provides and eight-beat rhythmic passage to which participants add syllables and a tune. One student sings "Bye-eye, bye-eye, bye-bye, bye-eye." OK, says Picard, "Find a physical movement that might go with it. Good. Now move it further. Get your body more involved. Bring it to another place, but keep in your space." The self-made choreography gets more intricate as more students, then the whole group of them, perform as a chamber ensemble, eventually improvising a short vocal drama. The mood in the room progresses from reticence to delighted exhilaration.
At the end of the session, several soloists try out more traditional recital pieces. Picard coaches, perched on the back of a front-row seat. To help a baritone loosen up a love song, six women are asked to come on stage one at a time and "relate to the singer in a loving way" for 12 beats. "Now," Picard tells the young man, "sing it again and see all those real people." He does so, much more freely this time.
Larry Picard was Dorothy Ornest's student during his time at UMass, and he initiated the workshop format, at her request , for her 75th gala birthday celebration in 1995. "She's not afraid to take a chance," says Picard. "This is one hell of a woman." Ornest "was a great teacher for me," he adds; "I'm not an opera guy, and she didn't push me into opera. She gave me oratorio and other kinds of song."
Picard is still performing those other kinds of song, mainly in the New York area. But he has also turned his creative energies to improvisational and experimental voice-movement performance, working with such innovators as Meredith Monk, Rhoda Levine and Ann Baltz. "Singers on stage are generally so dull to look at," Picard says. "I like to talk about inner motivation. You need to understand who you are and why you're there."
