Voice & Speech I develops your self-awareness and understanding of relaxation and openness. You begin to visualize and cultivate new images of the inner workings of your body and your breath and experience how release and relaxation lead to the multiplying and strengthening of vibration.
As your voice develops, the focus deepens toward the release of habits causing tension in the jaw, tongue, soft palate and throat. This work encourages a wide open physical channel, clearing the way to a fuller, more direct expression of thought/feeling impulses. With muscles released and the breath relaxed, your vibrations primed for free expression through an open pathway, you increase your vibrations by playing them off of the bony surfaces and resonating cavities of your chest, mouth, and teeth.
In Voice & Speech II, actors continue to develop awareness and freedom as they increase flexibility and variety in their speaking voice. Supported through voice exercises to increase breath capacity, actors learn to play in the upper resonators of their bodies.
Through the practice of arm, leg, and full-body swings students become familiar with the sensations of greater physical release in preparation for roles of greater physical, emotional and vocal demand. Students springboard on the power and momentum of their free voices into a focus on freeing the lips and tongue, the primary articulators of speech, to convey the infinite multitude of thoughts and feelings with clarity and specificity.
In Voice & Speech III, students build on the foundation developed in Voice I and II, and now focus the exploration and awareness on the individual speech and personal ‘accents’. The group explores the power and dynamics of sound vibrations moving within and through the body in a quest for deeper, fuller, and freer expression.
Participants play with sounds as the building blocks of language and explore vowels and consonants through an active physical engagement of the International Phonetic Alphabet.
This exploration stokes the desire to communicate and brings fullness to the actor’s spoken text. Through whole-body physical and vocal exercises, release and experimentation, students become aware of and explore their own specific way of speaking.
Whether speaking English with a general American accent, with regionalisms shaped nearby or in a distant country, students work to attain maximum intelligibility and freedom to create the possibility of communicating honestly and fully in any accent.
Voice & Speech IV is advanced speech and voice work, exposing actors to a variety of demanding texts that stretch and develop each participant’s individual eloquence and expression.
From a Linklater warm-up or workout in each class, students then move into practicing and exploring the dynamics of speech through poetry, including writers such as Shakespeare & Whitman, both in choral speaking and individually.
In the second half of the course, the work focuses more on performance, using classical and contemporary platform speeches of between 3-5 minutes. The precision of the language work continues while the actors include a practical study of rhetoric and argumentation. There is a final performance of the speeches at the end of the course, to which a willing public is warmly invited.
