Better Concerts and Music

When you sing for an audience, you want the story to come through and the listener to see and hear you connect your story and singing. The movements you make around the stage or around the room should enhance both your singing and the story. Small movements while singing can play a big part in enhancing your song. Try these tips for striking the right balance of movement while singing:

At home, practice moving around and singing, doing simple tasks as you sing just to practice doing two things at once. Once you can move around easily while singing, try speaking the words to your song and take note of what gestures you use. Knowing how you gesture when you speak helps you figure out how to move when your singing.

Some songs don’t require much movement at all. Err on the busy side at first when you’re practicing and then pare down the movement until you’re moving in response to what you’re saying. Moving around just for the sake of it when you’re singing doesn’t really enhance your song. When you sing classical music for example, you won’t need many gestures at all. Limit your movement to only those that are absolutely necessary when singing classical music.

For those of you who have just begun singing, your first priority should be to concentrate on your singing and technique rather than movement. When you first begin singing before an audience, don’t try to tackle to many things at once. Just developing your vocal technique will most likely be enough to keep you busy. Once you have developed your technique you can then learn how to move so that your movements enhance the story you are telling. You need to know where to look and how much to move when you sing.

Beginner singers tend to move their hands a lot when they sing because they believe that gestures make their song more appealing to the audience – and gestures can do just that, when they are used effectively. Just make sure that you don’t only move your hands, but also move your elbows away from your body and your palms are up and open.

If your hands normally move when you speak, then you may feel stiff if they remain frozen at your side during your song. Speak the words of the song so that you can understand what is happening in the story and how the character would respond to what is happening. Basically you gesture when you react so if you recognize opportunities to move your hands as a natural reaction to the text your singing then by all means do so because it will make your performance more interesting. However avoid excessive gesturing only to fill dead space.

I hope you found this information helpful. There are loads of great ways to learn how to sing online. Yes, that’s right, now you can affordably teach yourself how to sing with video lessons from acclaimed vocal coaches like Per Bristow. All the best with it!

Once you’ve gone to the trouble of hiring an after dinner speaker you might believe that all the hard work is over. Sadly this is not necessarily the case. After you’ve made the arrangements for who’ll be speaking you have to start your preparation work by ensuring that your after dinner speaker is fully briefed so he or she can be ready.

Many people make the mistake of assuming that hiring a professional after dinner speaker will guarantee them a professional speech with no problems. To save yourself the tedium of listening to a speech which has been recycled and used on every audience the speaker has ever addressed, you need to make sure the speaker knows some basic details before he or she tailors a presentation to the audience.

One of the simplest things that you must remember is the most often forgotten: to give the speaker enough information about the audience. He or she needs to know the age and gender of the audience and the reason they are in a room together in the first place. Are they workmates? Do they belong to a club or organisation? All of this is important and affects the speech. You should also let the after dinner speaker know exactly what the audience will be expecting from the speech. Whether they are expected motivation, humour, advice or something else entirely will affect the speech.

It is to be hoped you watched the speaker in action before hiring him or her. You should therefore feel confident that they won’t be littering their speech with clichés which will bore your audience Don’t feel guilty mentioning this to the speaker though. If you believe that your audience will appreciate or detest certain jokes then inform the speaker well ahead of time.
When reviewing the after dinner speaker before booking him or her you hopefully saw how they captured the audience’s attention. This is important in any speech, but if you believe your audience will be restless then you should also forewarn your speaker so that they can prepare to include the more interesting content early to grab the audience’s attention.

One of the best known movie horses was actually a non-existent one! ‘ A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ is Richard III’s cry when he desperately needs a horse to escape from those who would kill him on Bosworth Field.Quite different, however, from the evil Richard and his non-existent horse are the three we meet in these movies. While life in Richard III’s time may have been bloodier and generally a great deal more perilous, at least they didn’t have to worry about the necessities of veterinary bills or horse insurance!

The Black Stallion
Produced in 1979 – some 400 years after Shakespeare – this film deservedly won many awards.How Alec and a high-spirited Arabian stallion interact provide the narrative of this film. It includes a shipwreck, the rescue of the drowning Alec by the horse, and a period of slowly developing mutual trust on a desert island. This trust becomes total and the two become inseparable. Just how attached a horse and a man can be is brilliantly shown. I’ll refrain from telling you what happens because maybe you haven’t seen it yet. Possibly ‘the greatest children’s movie ever made’ was the opinion of one critic.But adults too can find much to relish in the film.

Black Beauty
Is black the only colour a horse can be?. ‘Piebald Beauty’ as a title looks a bit flat. Anyway, whereas we see the Black Stallion from the outside as observers, Black Beauty is herself the narrator in this 1994 production. The trouble – or one of them – is that the voice is so obviously human. This isn’t a complaint about the nature of the voice; if it sounded like a horse, any cinema would soon lose its audience. No, it’s the manner, tone, and content of what’s said that is so obviously not that of a horse. The human that Black Beauty portrays is that of a self-satisfied and rather smug person. This anthropomorphism simply doesn’t work. If you can ignore what a critic called ‘soppiness’, you can certainly enjoy the great scenes of Montana and of Black Beauty’s athleticism.

The Horse Whisperer
This film was issued 4 years later, in 1998. Grace and her precious horse, Pilgrim, recover from a terrible accident in this film. Following this accident, Grace’s mother, Annie, takes daughter and horse to the wide open spaces of Montana to seek the help of a man, Tom, who’s renowned for his ability to empathize with troubled horses. It is not only with horses that Tom can form close bonds; it’s with troubled women as well. Pilgrim and Annie are soon committed admirers. The film is not, though, only about the recovery of Grace and Pilgrim and the love that dawns between Annie and Tom; it’s also about the differences between city life (Annie came from a hectic metropolitan life in Manhattan) and country life. Annie is faced with choosing either the down-to earth Tom or her high-flying lawyer husband. Who will she choose?!

These horse movies will provide you with plenty of moving horses –  trotting, cantering and galloping, as well as moving moments. Although there is great beauty in many of the sequences, you could be moved to tears or mirth by some of the ‘moving’ moments. But in each movie you will get more than mere equine movement: the horses carry not only a rider but also a message. Whether the horse carries – or is saddled with – this message, and what the message is can be decided only by you. You can find out simply by phoning your local DVD store!

This article has been published for the millions of horse enthusiasts all over the world by Animal Friends Equine Insurance – the UK’s only not-for-profit horse insurance provider. You can buy horse rider insurance today online or by phone, and all net profits go towards helping animals in crisis around the globe. You can read more about the many charities helped by Animal Friends on the charity support pages of their ethical pet insurance website.