Teaching Specialties


Voice

Kate’s approach to voice work uses the principles of Alexander Technique to provide a holistic framework of understanding and self-fluency. The specific skills pertaining to vocal technique and performance are based on underlying principles of coordination, cooperation with design, sustainability and in service of artistic excellence.  With this approach, people are able to achieve the robust, delicate, emotionally stirring and virtuosic all with great resiliency to serve performance goals.


Singing

Kate works with singers to help them maximize resonance, release superfluous tension and become their own reliable system of bio-feedback. Singers develop self-reliance, confidence, increased breath capacity, greater agility, and a much more exciting vocal quality and stage presence. They become free to more deeply understand and communicate text, emotion and virtuosity in their performing, and keen awareness of how and why their singing is effective. Staging demands, character development and physicality become clear and effective, resulting in conscious and powerful artistic choices.
Kate specializes in highly ornamented vocal styles and subtle complexities of vocal traditions like Bulgarian and Indian singing, as well as classical, opera, contemporary and extended techniques. She works with singers in all styles including jazz, musical theater, pop, rock, folk, and numerous traditional musics.


Bulgarian Singing

Native and non-native singers work work with Kate to develop and refine their work in these complex musical idioms to become more stylistically precise, healthier, and more expressive. Her expertise is in accurately perceiving the coordination and artistry in the very best singers, and helping students to learn how to best express the music and vocal style with their own instruments. Kate provides cultural context and technical skills and information about metric structure, regional differences in style, dialects ornamentation.

Kate spent a year in Bulgaria in 2002 on a Fulbright Scholarship rehearsing and performing as a member of the The Academic Folk Choir of the Plovdiv Academy of Music, developing her work in regional solo repertoire, choral literature, conducting and pedagogy. She went on to found and direct a Bulgarian Vocal Ensemble at CalArts. She now works with singers all over the world to help them learn and perform this stirring and virtuosic music.


Alexander Technique

“The hallmarks of the Alexander Technique are creativity, spontaneity, and adaptability to change.”
A.R. Alexander

The Alexander Technique is a simple process by which anyone can learn to do what they wish to do, in the way they want to do it. By cooperating with our excellent human design, we can make constructive plans to move and live with the qualities we wish. It is an invaluable tool for actors, singers, and all kinds of performing artists to help them transcend their limitations, and can be used in any part of your life.

Alexander Technique is a means of psycho-physical re-education, designed to restore us to optimal coordination. We are living, dynamic beings. The technique helps us use a specific and simple cognitive process to access our best coordination. When we cooperate with the reality of our amazing human design, we can experience fully the potential of our capabilities.

Alexander’s discovery (verified later in the sciences) is that the head-spine relationship in vertebrate mammals is the organizing principle of all movement. When this relationship is restored to its natural design, all movement is more flexible, precise and appropriately coordinated.

When the head-spine relationship is compromised, there is compensation throughout the body. Alexander Technique provides both direct and indirect ways to change these patterns of mis-coordination. Lessons and study provide accurate, relevant information about physiological design, combined with conscious, constructive thinking in service of our desires. When we have accurate information about how we move, we can use constructive thinking to cooperate with our design, and the quality of everything we do improves. This holistic view of ourselves as a living system releases us from antiquated models of mechanistic thinking and movement.

There are a number of ways that we go out of coordination, usually from learned behaviors that when repeat over time, become habits. Sometimes we learn habits unconsciously; from family, friends, teachers, culture at large- and sometimes they are cultivated in association with a specific activity.

The effects of using the Alexander Technique are restored optimal coordination, better performance, ease in movement (including speech and singing) prevention of mis-coordination, better management of stress and its effects, and relief from pain.

In all cases, the technique allows us to make informed, creative choices about how we live.

Lessons can include any of the following:

  • relevant anatomy
  • physiology and functioning
  • observing the quality of movement and sound
  • developing reliable sensory awareness
  • intention and resulting coordination
  • precision in execution
  • economy of movement
  • cultivation of sustainable practice and stamina
  • improvisation/ innovation
  • performance techniques
  • practice techniques
  • vocal technique
  • specialized skills for specific activities (Bulgarian singing, acrobatics, running etc.)

Teacher Training

Kate works with teachers from all fields (voice, music, theater, mathematics, Alexander teachers etc) to increase their effectiveness, both in their own work and in their teaching. Individuals learn how to observe the quality of coordination in a vast array of activities, and how to develop creative, constructive strategies. This allows teachers to work easily and confidently within and outside of their own areas of expertise. It’s also a valuable skill that sets them apart from other teachers in their field and makes them a vital resource for their students and institutions.

For those wishing to deepen their work in the Alexander Technique, Kate facilitates further study toward becoming a teacher of the technique. This is done with a combined program of private lessons, group work and apprenticeship-style observation. The evaluation and certification process to become a teacher can be done through Alexander Technique International.

Contact Kate for more information.


Performance Coaching

Kate specializes in helping performers reach their highest potential. Using the underlying structure of human design and principles of coordination, she collaborates with performers to find simple and profound ways to hone technical skill to achieve extraordinary artistry. Combining specific performance techniques and the Alexander Technique provide a framework for virtuosity and communication with an audience.

She has worked with world-class performers from Broadway, Cirque du Soleil, and international opera stages.


Movement Consulting

Humans are designed for movement. Kate will observe your patterns of movement and help you develop strategies for improved coordination in your art, work, and life. Lessons include restoration of overall coordination, specific work in areas that may be limiting your ability to move with ease and comfort, and techniques for specialized activities—public speaking, performance, etc. Kate has helped lawyers, artists, web developers, PhD students, teachers, mathematicians, and jugglers gain ease and power in their movement.

She has worked in this capacity with Pinterest, Mahalo and members of The LA Phil and LA Master Chorale.