Stage preparation protocol

Osteopath Jean-Marie Legé gives the figure that changes the whole planning: digesting water takes six hours. Food is restoration, it compensates an effort afterwards. Hydration, by contrast, has to be anticipated ahead of the effort.

For an hour of singing, count roughly half a litre at least two hours ahead. Adeline Toniutti’s own rule for an 8pm show: two litres of water before 2pm.

On a plane, cabin air is very dry and the body spends about half a litre per hour and a half of flight. An artist landing the day before a date is therefore already behind on hydration before the soundcheck has even started.

A heel changes the curve of the spine, and therefore the muscular support available for singing. This is not a comfort question, it is a breathing question.

The performance heel is therefore worn long before the performance. Never on the day of the casting, never on the day of the concert. And the reverse holds too: going from heels to flats is also a change, and it needs its own adaptation period. Anatomie du Chant is explicit about this: rehearse in your stage shoes, and schedule a rehearsal in costume. Always plan a second pair, because one of them breaks.

Costumes get the same treatment: test every movement you will actually make in them. You need doubles, triples. And if you handle fire on stage, the costumes must be flame-retardant. A professional stylist knows this. Someone starting out does not.

Adeline Toniutti split a costume attempting the splits, on the night of the Freddie Mercury tribute concert given at the Théâtre de la MALS in Sochaux, on 20 November 2021. She was putting it on for the first time that evening.

This is exactly the mistake this chapter asks you to avoid, made by the person who teaches it. A costume you put on for the first time on the night of the show is a gamble.

You have to find what lets you sleep despite the stress of the performance, and install it as a ritual several days ahead. Some walk before going to bed, others train. Adeline Toniutti also asks that we look at what the research says about supplements, so here it is, with the same caveat she sets herself: any supplement calls for a medical consultation.

Quality sleep is part of the protocol just as much as technique. It cannot be caught up the night before.

Great footballers are massaged. Singers should be too. Estelle Moltenis, who followed Adeline Toniutti through Danse avec les Stars, describes the mechanism precisely: dancing nearly eight hours a day while holding tour dates produced soreness and muscular contractions that impeded the freedom of the laryngeal suspension.

Marie Zheng, Qi Gong master quoted in Anatomie du Chant, adds the tissue side: massage oxygenates the fascia, promotes its elasticity, and optimises postural work and muscular training. She also sets the limit, and that is what makes her point usable: it does not replace good vocal technique.

On cold, the trade-off is real. Madonna immerses herself for ten minutes in an ice bath after every concert and calls it the best treatment for injuries. Adeline Toniutti’s caution is the one to keep: it is good for the muscles, it is not good for the throat. Weigh the soreness against the voice, and above all avoid catching cold, because without the voice you do not go on stage. And before letting anyone crack your back, one point recalled by osteopath Jean-Marie Legé: treatment outcomes are more stable after a real manipulation than after cracking, and Andrew Taylor Still, who discovered osteopathy, had stopped manipulating by cracking as early as 1911, six years before his death.

Anatomie du Chant is direct on this point: some artists save themselves at the soundcheck, and pay for it during the show. Sing at full voice for a few minutes so the engineer sets real levels, and ask which good practices to follow with the microphones, the wedges or the in-ears.

In opera the acoustic changes with every house, but you often have the luck of rehearsing inside the theatre for weeks. In pop, with in-ears, that adaptation time is given to you by nobody: you have to take it.

The detail is settled track by track, and sometimes ear by ear: keeping one ear for the click, and leaving the other free for the direct sound of the piano. Those are the arbitrations you make at the soundcheck, not during the first song.

Not the difficult songs: the whole show, in order, several times before the real date. Chaining has to be a habit and not a discovery. Prepare a roadmap of your movements, including in relation to the lighting. If you are being filmed, get used to managing the cameras.

If you sing to a click, get used to it long in advance, in your preparatory work. On a large stage it is the rule rather than the exception.

Visualisation, finally, is done in two steps and never in one. You first imagine the worst, like a screenwriter listing every possible ending, to train your memory and your nervous system towards agility rather than freezing. Then, and this is the step everybody skips, you visualise success, through pleasant physical sensations. Adeline Toniutti advises against stopping at the first step, which produces instead an involuntary discharge of cortisol and stress.

None of these points is settled on the day of the show. They are settled weeks, sometimes months before, and that is precisely what separates a tour that holds from a tour that damages you.

One subject is deliberately missing here. Menstruation, hormonal variation and their effect on the voice deserve their own page, prepared with specialists. It is coming. In the meantime the same rule applies: vocal technique is what compensates in the weakest moments, and it has to exist before you need it.

This page is a general framework. In case of vocal fold pathology, the opinion of an ENT specialist or a phoniatrician comes before any preparation programme.