Efficient Expressivity: Toning Down Your Movement to Tone Up Your Performance

This month, the wonderful cellist and author Sara Sitzer talks to us about how to maximizing our performance by being mindful about our body movements.  Enjoy her delightfully insightful text and make sure to stop by her website to read more about and from her.  On to Sara!  - RPG

If you spend the majority of your days with an instrument in your hand, you're an athlete. What we do is physically demanding, exhausting, and, frankly, a bit unnatural! Think about it: we spend hours every day in a practice room, contorting our bodies in an effort to achieve technical perfection and dramatic musicality. And while stretches, yoga, and other healthful activities are key to taking care of ourselves as athletes, the technique that I have found to be the most powerful when it comes to saving energy, preventing injury, and playing more expressively, comes down to one word: EFFICIENCY.

Less is more.