Reaching New Heights with Kathryn Woodard, DMA

Reaching New Heights While Playing or Singing: Addressing Artistic Limitations Through Basic Applied Anatomy

This workshop will introduce participants to ways of working with students to heighten body awareness, increase stature and enhance expression while playing or singing. The presenter will draw on her own extensive experience in applied anatomy, including training in the Alexander Technique and Body Mapping, to demonstrate approaches for working with students from beginning to professional levels. The workshop will begin with perceiving and experiencing one’s full height or stature. This is a necessary step to experience ease and freedom of movement while making music, which in turn affects musicality and expression. Often younger students habituate a sitting stance at one point in their growth and have to remember that how they sit/stand and experience themselves at their instrument changes as they grow. This is not the only reason for habituated tension in the neck and shoulders, but delving into it can yield rapid results on a number of fronts and might convey to the student the need for further work to grow out of old (or young?) habits to reach a new height, both physically and musically. Other examples include: using “half the effort” to perform a specific task or passage in order to ascertain the appropriate effort in playing, and “feeling the floor” as a way to bring more whole body awareness to one’s playing. Workshop participants will experience these uses of applied anatomy in a series of exercises in order to recognize what changes in one’s own experience and how that might apply to students.

Brief description: This workshop will introduce participants to specific strategies for working with students to heighten body awareness, increase stature and enhance expression at their instrument. The presenter will guide participants through steps that will help  students find their full height and experience more ease in their playing.

Following decades of performing, researching and collaborating with entities such as Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project, the Smithsonian Institution, and the U.S. State Department, pianist Kathryn Woodard has amassed a substantial library of concert and teaching repertoire that highlights composers and traditions from around the globe. In line with the UNESCO Framework for Culture and Arts, Woodard embraces the inclusion of diverse repertoire in her own teaching practice as a way both to broaden students’ knowledge of the world and its numerous creative practices and also to foster a sense of belonging among students of different backgrounds. In her presentation Woodard will discuss and perform works from China, Costa Rica, Croatia, India, Jamaica, Nigeria, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States, most of which are easily accessible in print or digital format. She will delve into specific stylistic traits as well as technical and interpretive difficulties in selections that range from elementary to advanced levels. She will also be joined by vocalists Aaron Scarberry and Amanda Staub to highlight selections chosen for voice students.

Kathryn Woodard, DMA