LET’S GET PHYSICAL: HGO’S YAVA SINGERS GET IN TOUCH WITH THEIR BODIES THROUGH MOVEMENT CLASSES AND MEAN GIRLS
It’s day three of Houston Grand Opera’s 2024 Young Artist Vocal Academy, and eight energetic singers are assembled in a rehearsal room for their monologue class. I’m expecting to hear excerpts from Oscar Wilde or Shakespeare—the kinds of plays opera composers are apt to adapt. One curly haired participant stands to deliver her speech. “I’m Maya McGuire,” she says confidently, “and today I’d like to do Regina George’s monologue from Mean Girls by Tina Fey.”
McGuire and her seven colleagues are promising vocal majors studying at prestigious programs across the country: Juilliard, Missouri State, Oberlin, the Curtis Institute, and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory. Founded in 2011, HGO’s YAVA course is intended to help smooth the transition from university to the next professional milestone. YAVA annually welcomes two groups of young artists to the Wortham Theater Center for back-to-back weeklong programs, held this year from May 12-26.
HGO is unique in that it offers training at every point in a singer’s development: summer camps for elementary, middle, and high school students; the Bauer Family High School Voice Studio for students considering pursuing vocal performance in college; YAVA for undergrads; and the Sarah and Ernest Butler Houston Grand Opera Studio for post-grads. Nearly a dozen vocalists have progressed through the latter stages of this HGO “pipeline,” graduating from YAVA to the Butler Studio before embarking on successful operatic careers.
But readers might be surprised to learn that actual singing features relatively little on a YAVA participant’s busy schedule: only three half-hour coaching sessions per day so as not to overtax their voice. The bulk of time is devoted to non-musical topics—for example, Butler Studio Director Colin Brush led a discussion on navigating the opera industry. But from an artistic standpoint, the most valuable resources are the movement and acting workshops that help singers ripen into well-rounded performers with genuine stage presence.
So how does Mean Girls fit in? While initially skeptical about McGuire’s choice, I’m blown away by her hilarious rendition of Regina George’s trash-talking—the scene where the Queen Bee shares a bit of juicy gossip with Cady Heron. Once she’s taken her bow, McGuire receives some positive feedback from her peers and then hears from instructor Skye Bronfenbrenner.
“We talked about characterization and finding a gesture or something that is the essence of a character,” says Bronfenbrenner. “What’s Regina’s favorite thing about herself?”
“Probably my boobs,” answers McGuire, without missing a beat.
“Awesome, how can those feature in your story?” asks Bronfenbrenner. “How many different ways do you draw attention to this? Is it like, ‘Oh, I love the way this shirt feels…’?” (She adjusts her top flirtatiously.) “That’s a ‘nugget’ that you can bring in that makes her Regina instead of Maya.”
McGuire repeats the short monologue, working in an absent-minded hair twirl and shifting her blouse. They’re subtle motions, but they completely transform her performance, fleshing out a personality distinct from her own.
I catch up with McGuire a couple days later. She’s recently graduated with a vocal degree from CCM, where she minored in yoga studies. As a certified yoga instructor, McGuire is already intensely in tune with her holistic health: “In teaching other people how to get in touch with their breath, their body, and their mental wellbeing, it’s really helped me tap into those things. But they’re not a part of our conservatory curriculum in the way that I really think they should be for young singers.”
YAVA, by contrast, places the body front and center, as McGuire explains: “First of all, we begin with this foundation of body awareness for ourselves—really getting in touch with how we express ourselves in our natural habits. And then once we have that basic understanding, we can step outside of ourselves into a new character with new physicality, new habits.
“You don’t realize how that individual work can affect your colleagues,” adds McGuire. “The next step is then, how does my relationship with my body work with my scene partner?”
Bronfenbrenner, a fight choreographer, also serves as an intimacy director. While this often involves supervising romantic onstage encounters, it can extend to any kind of interpersonal touching. Bronfenbrenner presented an hourlong crash-course on consent, boundaries, and power dynamics before having the YAVA participants partner up to improvise short scenes.
“Instead of saying, ‘Oh, I’m going to come at you, and we’re going to make out, and I’m going to jump on you,” says McGuire, “it’s like, ‘In this scene, here are my boundaries, this is what I’d like to choreograph.’ We both know, contractually, what we’re about to get ourselves into. And then you get to play.
“We agreed to a hug, a handshake, or a high five, and we were able to play out this gesture in different scenarios. For example, we were just friends, but one of us ended up falling in love with the other. Or we’re at a family reunion where someone has a secret, and the other one knows it.”
But how do you communicate such specific situations in a simple gesture?
“Through our bodies,” says McGuire. “We used language like, ‘What’s the color of our body right now? What’s the material? Is my body red and fiery? Or am I feeling more like crunchy ice?’ These are sensations that we’re able to physicalize.”
This corporeal focus also extended into the singing portions of YAVA. In the past, McGuire has been frustrated by the kind of vague metaphors that her teachers invent to convey concepts. “I’ve been told, ‘Think of a beach ball,’ for my breathing,” she recalls. “Okay. I’m trying to feel what a beach ball would feel like. And it’s overcomplicating things.”
McGuire much prefers the anatomical approach taken by her YAVA coach Stephen King, a professor emeritus of voice at Rice who serves as the Butler Studio’s Director of Vocal Instruction: “He is just an incredible technician and pedagogue. He’ll say, ‘These are your eighth ribs. Feel them. Right underneath is your diaphragm. It looks like this. It’s going to feel like this when you inhale and when you exhale.’”
After all, the voice and the body aren’t two separate entities, but one and the same. It’s this lesson that McGuire has taken away with her from YAVA: “Our bodies are our instruments. Because we’re vocalists, we’re often like, ‘Oh, we have this little voice box that we can never see—we can never touch—and thus it’s all invisible.’
“No! We’re a resonant chamber, and our entire body needs to be explored in this way. We can’t be afraid of that. That’s been really liberating for me.”
Toward the end of their week with HGO, McGuire and her YAVA pals—which included one old friend, her CCM roommate Lea Nayak—had a chance to see HGO’s season-closing performance of Madame Butterfly at Miller Outdoor Theatre. On the final evening of the program, they presented a recital of arias they had been preparing over the course of the week. The next day, a new cohort of eight talented young singers arrived in Houston for a second YAVA session. Information for future applicants can be found on the HGO Butler Studio page.