Featured image: Brianna Borger. Courtesy of Brianna Borger.
“I always go back to Acting 101 – who are you talking (singing) to, and what do you want from them?” Brianna Borger said.
The voice teacher and stage director begins song interpretation with a person to address and something to ask of them. In an email interview with Scapi, she described how those choices can shape singing, and how the close musical reading she brings to teaching also informs her directing.
Borger said, “When I ask singers this question, their answer is often a long explanation of the character and their backstory and the plot of the show, which is great knowledge to have, but is way too much to try to encapsulate when a song is taken out of a show’s structure.”
The next step is to give the exchange urgency. Borger said, “Instead, focus on those two very simple questions – and make sure the stakes are HIGH. You have already reached enough of an emotional point that you had to move from speaking to singing – so once you’re singing, you have to keep going up!”
That urgency can come from circumstances a singer can connect with personally. Borger said, “I also encourage my students to create situations that feel personal to them, or that they can at least relate to, which instantly brings honesty and connection to their performance. If you struggle with trying to picture a romantic partner when singing a love song, sing to an adorable puppy at the shelter instead!”
The imagined listener can change while the underlying relationship and desire stay in place. As Borger explained, “So long as the base conceit stays the same (“I’m singing to someone I love and I want them to hug me”), the audience will not know if you have moved the song into a context that your brain can more easily connect with.”
Borger described a recent lesson with a student working on “Back to Before” from Ragtime. The student wanted more vocal power at the end of the song, but her acting choices centered on mourning a life that was over.
That reading fit the song’s lyrics and the show’s plot, Borger said, but it left the performance static. She recalled, “There was no movement or change happening, it just felt like deeper and deeper wallowing.”
Borger offered the student a different way through the song: “I had her reimagine the song not as a reflection on what she’d lost, but as a slow discovery of what her life has been, leading to a moment of revelation at the song’s final key change.”
In Borger’s account, that change in dramatic action also changed the singing. She said, “This shift instantly made the song more active, and without focusing on vocal technique, she had the power she wanted at the end of the song – the dramatic choices she made naturally caused her to take deeper breaths, extend phrases, and build to the big finish she’d been hoping for.”
When asked whether directing had changed her teaching, Borger reversed the relationship.
“I don’t believe that directing has changed how I teach song interpretation – if anything, it’s the other way around!” she said.
Borger looks to the choices composers and lyricists leave on the page, including shifts in rhythm, tonality and the placement of a rest. She asks, “Why is there a rest in this phrase the first time through but not the second time through? Why does the accompaniment suddenly change tonality here? Why is the verse swung but the chorus is not?”
Those musical details are part of how she reads the drama. Borger said, “There is so much dramaturgy to be done with music alone, and I think that’s something fairly unique that I bring to the table as a director.”
That work carries into the rehearsal room, where she wants to be involved in the music as well as the staging. Borger said, “I tend to work very closely with my MDs, and I like to be as much a part of music rehearsals as I am with staging, having the same conversations with actors about the structure of their songs as we do about the structure of their scenes.”
Find Brianna Borger’s work at www.briannaborger.com.
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