Lasting, meaningful change doesn’t come from just altering the position of the singing body.

I began my teaching career loaded up with book knowledge where the topic of posture, particularly in classical singing, was seen through the lens of the noble posture; the head is directly over the shoulders, the sternum is high, ribcage expanded, pelvis neutral, feet in modified second position. Noble posture told me there was a correct way to stand when you are singing.

This view was narrow, absolutist and it lent itself to issuing directives like ‘lift your sternum’ with no accounting for what the body was doing to get the sternum in an elevated position; the way the body compensated to get the sternum higher.



In the studio, I could tell students to lift this or shift that, but not only did they create a new compensation to get there, as soon as they moved even a step, they would lose the new shape they’d found. It created frustration for them and for me because I could see that their chest was dropped or their back was swayed, but a one time directive never created a long term solution.

I was taught that posture could be prescribed, but it never seemed to solve the root cause…so, why were we asking for this in our singing lessons?

Learning about the concept of alignment expanded my thinking because it shifted attention from isolated body parts to the relationship between them. But it still relied on a mechanical view of the body that never fully explained what I saw in singers.



I could align a body using bony markers, but then I just had a singer who was hunched over, felt discomfort in their thighs because their feet no longer turned out, and felt like they couldn’t move at all because their ribcage would no longer be directly over their pelvis.

Alignment helped me see relationships within the body more clearly, but it still described the body’s organization rather than explaining why that organization existed.

Biotensegrity helped me see the body less as a stack of bones and more as a living system in which bones are suspended and balanced through the continuous tension created by tissues like fascia, muscles, tendons, and ligaments.

Within this model when one part of the structure changes, it echoes out throughout the rest of the body. Tension in one place, creates pulls in others. It helped me understand that we didn’t need to just reduce tension, we needed to redistribute it so there was better balance in the system.



Change, in the biotensegrity model, isn’t about simply placing a body part where it needs to be and hoping for the best.

It is about understanding how the pushes and pulls of internal and external forces create the shape of our body. And, how we can use breathing and movement to create lasting change.

At the heart of creating meaningful change in the body lies the nervous system. It is what is positioning our bodies in response to what feels safe. To create change in the body that is lasting, we must first begin with creating circumstances of safety.

I’ve learned that change begins by establishing trust. Next we need to slow down, maybe doing gentle movement in a reduced range, or exploring stillness. It also requires finding ways of moving that don’t create pain, strain or additional compensation.The nervous system learns at the speed of safety, which is individual to each human and often looks much slower than we’d like. Give the brain a new input and it will give you a different output.



When I work with a singer now, it isn’t about creating perfect posture, it is about creating a body that has a new baseline as well as the ability to move away from that baseline and back to it.

Posture is the visible result of a person’s movement history, habits, breathing strategy, emotions, and adaptations. Alignment can describe how the body is organized, but lasting change comes when we use breath and movement to create new habits.

While all of these models are wrong in the sense that they are incomplete, each has been useful as it has expanded my lens of how to see the singing body.

When I began teaching, I believed good posture was something I could prescribe. Today, I think a singer’s body is a reflection of how they have learned to organize themselves in gravity, under effort, and in response to a lifetime of experiences.

My job is no longer to put singers into the “right” position, but to help them develop new ways of organizing themselves through breath and movement so they can respond more freely to the demands of singing.