Playing with Shakespeare and allowing Shakespeare to play (with) you
Taught by Master Teachers Flloyd Kennedy & Aole T. Miller
Studio 5, Brooklyn,

Saturday, December 13th
11am – 4pm
$100
This workshop will incorporate Fitzmaurice Voicework, Aole’s Archetype Masks, and Flloyd Kennedy’s signature Archetypal Character Development. Bring your favorite speeches from Shakespeare, anything from monologues to sonnets, and spend fab, fun, physical five hours exploring the sounds, the tastes, the smells, the images and the movement of Shakespeare’s language. This will be a great opportunity to work graduate school classical monologues.
Fitzmaurice Voicework work is one of the best voice techniques for getting actors out of their heads, and into their bodies. In Fitzmaurice Voicework, there are a series of positions inspired by the work of Wilhelm Reich, yoga, and shiatsu designed to activate the human body to breath and energy, to allow and encourage breathing patterns to change size, direction, placement, and rhythm, as required by both the demands of the body and of the thought to be expressed (text). As a result, actors open up to what is happening with the body rather than trying to make something happen that they think ought to be happening. It also allows actors to:
*Expand the range of what can be experienced and expressed through breath and language
*Become more emotionally available to heightened text
*Speak expressively even when nervous or emotional
*Strengthen the voice and reduce vocal fatigue
Masks show the important connection between Body and Voice. The Greek word personae means Mask, the personae was a projected image through the voice. Almost everyone at one point in his or her life is conscious of their voice and the sounds that the body makes, and it is these sounds that actually aid in the development of human character. The power that exudes through the deep connection of body and voice is easily accomplished through masks. Aole will incorporate mask work when working on freeing the voice’s pitch range, the physical center of character and deepening the experience of vocal transformation within character and text.
Archetypes are familiar, yet heightened ways of being human, from which we recognize friends and enemies, dream figures, iconographic and mythic ideals. Unlike stereotypes, which are fixed, unvarying, oversimplified conceptions of ways of being, Archetypes allow the actor to manifest the intrinsic instability which lies at the core of life and which the actor strives to embody in performance, essentially alive and transformative. Playing with Archetypes is mask work without the mask, physically and vocally liberating, providing the foundation for developing truthful and credible characters.
AOLE T. MILLER a Certified Associate Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework is the Creative Director of STUDIO 5, Executive Director of the International Antonin Artaud Fringe Theatre Festival, and the Producing Director of The New Moon Rep. in Brooklyn, New York. He has been an actor-director-writer-teacher in the United States, Denmark, Singapore, Australia, and Bali, Indonesia since 1992 and has been Director of the Bali Conservatory since 2002. He is the first African American Ceremonial Mask Dancer of Bali and the first teacher to bring Fitzmaurice Voicework to Denmark. He coached Michelle Williams for her Academy Award nominated performance in Ang Lee’s movie Brokeback Mountain. He teaches Mask Work, Fitzmaurice Voicework, Michael Chekhov, Viewpoints, and Grotowski’s concepts of the physical container and the plastiques for character development. He is a member of VASTA and is on the faculties of Chautauqua Theatre Company. He has taught at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Yale University, The Actors Center, Wayne State (MFA), The New School (MFA), SUNY Purchase College, University of Southern California, The Bill Esper Studio, Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts, The National Theatre Institute, Howard University, Western Michigan University, The School for Film and Television, and the Michael Chekhov Conference 2002. Directing credits: Proof (New Moon Rep), I Kreon (New Moon Rep), Voices of Juarez (New York Fringe 2003). He is currently he is translating Jean Genet’s The Maids and The Blacks and developing Romeo and Juliet, which he will be directing in Perth 2009. He holds a B.F.A. in theatre from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
Flloyd Kennedy is an actor, director, voice and acting coach and who has spent many years traveling the world, exploring different performance techniques and ways of creating theatre (including The Original Shakespeare Co). She has performed in, and directed Shakespeare productions from Scotland (as artistic director of Golden Age Theatre) to Brisbane, Australia, working with professional actors, students and community and youth groups.  Flloyd has taught voice skills, verse speaking and Shakespeare at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (Glasgow Scotland), QUT (Queensland Australia), Rutgers University (NJ USA), University of Otago (Dunedin NZ) and La Salle University (Singapore). Directing credits include All’s Well That Ends Well (Young Actors Co, Qld), Pericles (Golden Age Theatre, Edinburgh Festival Fringe), The Winter’s Tale (Qld Shakespeare Ensemble), A Life in the Theatre (Trocadero Productions), Iphigenia in Tauris (Golden Age Theatre), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Golden Age Theatre, Mayfest, Edinburgh Festival Fringe). Flloyd is researching “A Theory of the Voice in Performance” (PhD) at the University of Queensland, and provides voice and acting training through her private studio Being in Voice. She will appear in her latest play, “The Fall of June Bloom: A Modern Invocation” at !Metro Arts in Brisbane in 2009.
To register contact:
Aole T. Miller
347-351-8430
[email protected]
or
Flloyd Kennedy
348-278-2032
[email protected]