How and Why to Incorporate Movement in Choral Rehearsals

The use of movement in the choral rehearsal has yielded enthusiastic support from conductors, producing numerous studies, presentations, and articles demonstrating movement's effectiveness as a teaching technique and encouraging conductors to include movement in their rehearsals. Studies have shown that when pedagogical theory is shared, students perceive movement exercises in the choral rehearsal to be beneficial to themselves as individuals and to the choir as a whole in the following ways: * Keeping themselves alert, engaged, and ready to sing. * Improved breathing technique and increased breath support. * Improved singing technique (tone, posture, diction). * Improved accuracy (pitch, rhythm, intonation, and balance). * Singing more expressively (dynamics, emotion, phrasing, tone, energy, staccato/legato, overall musicality, etc). When we transfer verbal metaphors to physical movement, our singers experience non-visual and non-tangible musical descriptions personally and physically, thus connecting with and understanding the music at a deeper level. LMA descriptors such as float, punch, glide, slash, dab, wring, flick, and press are transferrable to music when describing articulations, tone color, dynamics, and a myriad of other musical elements.