Meet Your 8-Octave Voice
Ethelyn Friend is a NYC-based actor/singer, writer and voice teacher
What Ethie brings to her teaching from her extensive experience as a performer is not only a thorough knowledge of how to access one’s voice, but also a deep empathy for the inner process that performance students must undergo as they encounter, work with, and overcome all the personal blocks, and fears that crop up on the road to performance freedom. –Steve Wangh, Author of Acrobat of the HeartEthelyn Friend is a NYC-based actor/singer, writer and voice teacher; a member of the Roy Hart Center in France since 2003, and a founding faculty member of Naropa University’s groundbreaking MFA Theater: Contemporary Performance Program, the first graduate training program to integrate contemporary physical theatre forms, Viewpoints, extended range vocal work and traditional contemplative practices. She encountered the Roy Hart Theatre voice work in 1991, a classically trained soprano who had been warned never to sing below middle C. The expansion of the literal and figurative range of the voice which followed profoundly revolutionized the course of her life and work.
Areas of expertise include extended voice applied to Shakespeare, new approaches to music-theatre work, improvisation in performance, and creating bridges between the speaking and singing voice onstage.
Additional teaching: NYU/Experimental Theatre Wing, Brandeis University MFA Acting, Cornish College For the Arts, University of Colorado. Recent performance credits: Off-Broadway: Coal Country (The Public Theater), Our Brother’s Son (Signature Theatre), Troilus + Cressida (Baryshnikov Arts), Spill, Casa Cushman (Tectonic Theatre workshops). Original solo shows include More Than Daisy Dares, based on Emily Dickinson’s Master Letters, Blackout: How I Became White In America, an autobiographical account of family ancestry. Ethelynfriend.com
