Unique Issues in Performing Artists: Part 2
In the previous blog post, I wrote about unique issues surrounding performing artists and the reluctance to seek medical help. Part 2 will tackle issues that are specific to each discipline: dance, music, and vocal arts.
Dancers are a special crowd. They have good kinesthetic sense – the sense of movement and knowing where their bodies are in space. I have two left feet and it takes me forever to learn choreography (my medical school experience was peppered with variety shows; perhaps that’s for another blog post). Dancers don’t have that problem. They know how to move and love doing so. Anyway, I digress. Dancers have to look good while dancing – their lines have to be clean, sharp, graceful, whatever the choreographer wants… and they know how to embody the choreographer’s vision of beauty. In addition to moving the body beautifully (the aesthetic), dancers also have to be athletic. They have to be in excellent physical condition and have the endurance needed to continuously move their bodies for extended amounts of time. Dancers typically thinks of themselves as artists instead of athletes, yet they have similar physical and nutritional needs with athletes.
Musicians have been called small muscle athletes. They work their finger flexors and extensors a lot more than the ordinary person – these are the muscles that help you grasp and let go of things, type on a keyboard and do all the neat stuff fingers do. To be able to do this for long periods of time takes a lot of practice and endurance. Unfortunately – and this is from personal experience – musicians would rather make music instead of exercising. I’m guilty of that. So while the fingers get wonderfully developed, the rest of the body isn’t in very good condition. It can affect technique and cause aches and pains elsewhere (for example, neck and back pain during sitting or standing for long periods of time). The other big issue with musicians is noise-induced hearing loss – we’ve heard stories about rock stars going deaf because of the constant exposure to loud music, but orchestral musicians have this problem too (imagine sitting in an orchestra onstage, with the trumpets right behind you – that’s loud!).
Next up, the vocal arts: singers, actors, broadcasters and other people who use their voice for a living. With these folks, they should ideally be in the best general physical condition possible. Your body is your instrument. Voice does not just involve body parts from the neck up. Breath support (your muscles of respiration pushing air from the lungs up through vocal cords and your mouth) and posture can affect vocal quality. Doing this for extended periods of time means vocal artists must possess the endurance to keep going; being physically fit definitely helps. I will defer to my ENT (ear-nose-throat) colleagues for most of the problems in vocalists, but if there’s nothing wrong with the person’s anatomy from the neck up, perhaps there’s something to investigate in other body parts which are also involved in voice production: the core/trunk muscles, diaphragm, and other parts of the musculoskeletal system that hold you upright.
