Karyn Levitt's performance coaching connects you with your audience.
Performance coaching is for anyone going on stage:
Embody what you are saying, and your song, your poem, your story, or speech will magically reach across the stage lights and vibrationally enter everyone in the room.
“A faculty member described the production as, in a word, 'amazing... Karyn Levitt is a superb and dynamic stage presence as well as a gifted vocalist and she infused the music with her own enthusiastic love and understanding of it…’”
- Brigid Doherty, Princeton University, Director of the Program in European Cultural Studies
Karyn Levitt works with singers, actors, musicians, poets, keynote speakers, storytellers, vocal ensembles, and classical singers. She can help you embody the story of a song, a poem, a melody, or speech, such that it is received by everyone in the room.
To schedule a session, send a message through the contact form, specifying “Performance Coaching.”
In-person and Zoom sessions available.
Judy Garland, Billie Holliday, and Frank Sinatra embodied the songs they sang. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in Schubert’s “Erlkoenig” voices the narrator, the father, the son, and an evil spirit, in a harrowing performance that stops time.
What are the great singers doing that makes it so you can hardly breathe, as the song unfolds and enfolds you?
The voice is an instrument for transmitting meaning. And singing is storytelling of a special kind: the story is in the lyricist’s words, the story is in the composer’s music, and the story is in your being – and when all those stories line up, you become the song.
Karyn coaches classical singers at any level to embody words and music, to communicate viscerally, while staying within a classical technique.
I’ve studied classical voice, jazz, cabaret, acting, improv, and the Alexander Technique as applied to classical singing. I was also a student of Eric Bentley (my mentor in the songs of Brecht and Eisler), who demanded — as translator and lyricist — that I get the meaning of his words across when singing his song translations. I’ve learned so much from all my teachers as well as many great singers whose performances I’ve experienced in person. The singers I most admire have one thing in common: when they sing, they send the meaning straight to my heart.
About her album, Eric Bentley’s Brecht-Eisler Song Book, music critic Peter Deeg wrote: "Karyn Levitt is able to achieve great poetic beauty by blending the words and the music to form an artful and contradictory whole, at once unusual and touching," (Internationale Hanns Eisler Gesellschaft, 2016).