Pilates for singers: the body as an instrument

Oct 12

From Joseph Pilates and the opera singers of 1950s New York to the singers I teach today: exploring breath, movement and the body behind the voice.

Pilates and performers

Long before Pilates became the familiar name it is today, Joseph and Clara Pilates were working in their New York studio, teaching a method Joseph called Contrology. Their equipment looked unlike conventional exercise machines, and their approach to movement could be equally unconventional.

For a professional dancer, an injury could mean the premature end of a career. Word travelled among colleagues about a German man who might be able to help them return to the stage.

Kathy Grant, who would later become one of the influential teachers of the Pilates method, first visited Joseph Pilates following a serious knee injury. A fellow dancer, Pearl Lang, had encouraged her to see him, telling her that he would help her dance again.

Kathy later recalled that Joseph had her stand and walk rather than immediately giving her the exercises she expected. When she questioned how this would help her return to dancing, he asked whether she could run for a bus or climb stairs. If she couldn't manage those everyday activities, how could she expect to dance?

It is a story I first heard from Cara Reeser during my Pilates Heritage training, and one that has stayed with me.

Many of the teachers who carried Joseph and Clara's work into the next generation came from dance. Their influence is still heard in Pilates studios today, in words such as plié, développé and port de bras. It also helped shape the image of Pilates: long lines, balletic movement and the particular bodies associated with dance.

But dancers weren't the only performers coming through Joseph and Clara's studio. Singers were there too.

One of the best documented was Metropolitan Opera soprano Roberta Peters. In 1951, LIFE magazine photographed the 21-year-old Peters working with Joseph Pilates, a year after her Metropolitan Opera debut. In the most memorable photograph, Pilates appears to be standing on her abdomen, what LIFE called her "operatic breadbasket."

Peters wasn't an isolated example. Opera singers Elaine Malbin and Nedda Casei also studied with Pilates.

And when we consider the physical demands of singing, it makes sense to me that they found their way there.

The body behind the voice

A singer's instrument is usually described as the voice. More specifically, we might think of the larynx, vocal folds and respiratory system. But singing doesn't happen in an isolated vocal apparatus.

Breathing changes the shape of the rib cage and abdomen. The diaphragm participates in managing pressure. The ribs, spine, neck and shoulders are moving – or sometimes being prevented from moving. The feet meet the floor. The whole person has to organise themselves around breath, sound, phrasing and performance.

Research into professional singers reflects this complexity: singing involves patterns of respiratory movement across the rib cage and abdomen that differ from quiet breathing, while studies of classical singers have also examined the relationship between singing, proprioception and postural control.

This is where I find Pilates particularly interesting for singers.

I have been teaching singers for almost a decade. Some originally came to my group Pilates classes and later asked to work privately because ideas we were exploring in class had begun to find their way into their own singing and, sometimes, even into the way they taught singing themselves. Over the years, our Pilates sessions have increasingly become a place to investigate the body behind the voice.

Making more of the rib cage available

This exploration extends beyond what we conventionally think of as breathing exercises. The first two rib rings sit surprisingly high, partly above the clavicles, while the floating ribs extend into the thoracolumbar region. The rib cage can flex, extend, side-bend and rotate, and our shoulder blades move across its surface.

Sometimes a small anatomical discovery changes someone's sense of the whole area. I might ask a client to place a finger where the clavicle meets the manubrium and feel the sternoclavicular joint. Or I may gently take hold of their shoulder blades and let them experience how much movement is actually available there.

For someone who has spent years hearing "shoulders back and down," this can be surprisingly liberating. The aim isn't to find a perfect position, but to develop a clearer map of the area and more possibilities for movement.

One image I use comes from my studies with Cara Reeser: imagine the arms, shoulder blades and clavicles as a cape, with the manubrium as the buckle at the front. The image helps us explore how these structures move together, and how their changing relationships influence the movement of the rib cage.

Breathing is movement

Breathing is an obvious place to begin, but I don't teach singers one "correct" Pilates breath.

My understanding of breathing developed substantially through Kathy Grant's work and later through Your Song Is Your Strength, part of Movement Science Made Simple. I began exploring the thorax and abdomen as containers whose shapes continually change, and how different breathing strategies can influence the way we organise movement.

The sternum and ribs move. The abdominal wall responds. The diaphragm changes shape. Pressure changes within the trunk. And different tasks require different strategies.

In practice, this can be very simple. I might ask someone to place their hands on different parts of the rib cage and notice where movement is easy to feel and where it isn't. We might explore Kathy Grant's breathing exercises, change the position of the body, or introduce sound during movement and see what becomes available.

One of the things that often takes the longest is finding a neutral position for the neck. I know this from my own experience. It took me a long time to recognise what that position actually felt like. Initially, I had the strange sensation that I was looking upwards, almost towards my own eyebrows, even when my head was in a more neutral position.

Explaining this to someone is one thing. Helping them experience it is another. With singers, I can ask them to sing or produce a sound as we explore different positions of the head and neck. Their own voice gives them immediate feedback. They can hear and feel what changes, rather than simply taking my word for it.

This is what I find particularly useful about working with singers: their voice becomes another source of information about their movement.

What happens if you sing here?

This is one of my favourite parts of working with singers.

We might explore thoracic rotation, lateral flexion, shoulder movement or a demanding Pilates exercise, and then I ask them to sing. Not because I already know what the voice should sound like in that position, but because it gives us another source of information.

One of my long-term clients has occasionally stopped after an exercise and told me that his breath – and consequently his voice – felt immediately different. I found this particularly interesting when he hadn't been making any sound during the exercise itself.

Something had changed in the organisation of the task, and he could hear or feel its effect when he sang again.

This is also why we should be cautious about simply telling a singer to "stand up straight", "open the chest" or "put the shoulders back". A fixed idea of good posture can sometimes give us fewer options rather than more.

A singer needs support, certainly. But support doesn't have to mean rigidity.

Sound can change movement too

The relationship also works in the other direction. Movement can affect sound, but making sound can change movement.

I first experienced this very clearly through Kathy Grant's work. In Sand Tunnels, an exercise she developed for tight hamstrings, you sit with the knees bent, hold the toes and gradually straighten the legs along the floor while whistling. The sound is part of the exercise.

What interested me was what happened to the movement while making it. The whistle changes the exhalation, but also the effort, timing and experience of stretching the legs. Something that might otherwise become a determined attempt to "stretch the hamstrings" becomes a different task altogether.

Kathy used sound in other ways too: hissing, speaking and different breathing patterns could become part of the movement itself. Through the Heritage work, I began to understand sound as another variable we could play with rather than something separate from movement.

For singers, that relationship becomes particularly interesting. They already know that changing how sound is produced changes what they have to do with breath. In Pilates, we can explore the relationship from both directions: what happens to the voice when we change the movement, and what happens to the movement when we change the sound?

The body as our medium

A recent conversation with a client brought me back to an idea I first encountered while studying art theory. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty described the body as our means of experiencing and engaging with the world. We don't simply use our bodies to act out our intentions; experience itself is embodied. For a singer, this becomes particularly tangible: the body isn't carrying the instrument. The body is part of the instrument.

Pilates doesn't replace vocal training. I am not a singing teacher, and my role isn't to teach someone how to produce a beautiful tone. What Pilates offers is another way to explore the physical conditions from which that tone emerges: breath, pressure, support, mobility, strength, coordination and the ability to change how we organise ourselves.

More than seventy years ago, opera singers were already finding their way into Joseph and Clara Pilates's New York studio. Their presence is a part of Pilates history worth remembering alongside the dancers, and one that continues to resonate with me whenever a singer walks into my studio today.