acting – Page 6 – Being in Voice

Voice IS Movement

Flloyd Kennedy 13 December 2012 Performance Skills Training, Voice acting, breath, communication, creativity, dance, Flloyd Kennedy, Jon M Chu, movement, performance, public speaking, training, voice, voice training, words, workshop

A week or so ago I ran into a young woman who had taken part in some short classes I once ran for a group of performance studies students. There were five hour long classes, not compulsory. Some students came to all five, some would arrive late, others would leave early to finish assignments or attend rehearsals. As far as I am aware, this was their only opportunity for voice training. The young woman apologised that she hadn’t followed up on the voice work because she had spent the past six years “working on my body instead”.

I was so shocked in that moment that I had absolutely nothing to say. Thoughts like “I’ve failed!” “I must be a dreadfully bad teacher” floated through my head like rats in a flood.

Then I came across this video. It’s a gorgeous short film, created by master film maker Jon M. Chu (Never Say Never, Step Up 2: The Streets and Step Up 3D, illustrating the power of the body to communicate and move us. It’s inspiring, and I love it.

Here is a reminder of how it is introduced:

“This is what we believe…There are things in this world more powerful than words… movement is the most basic form of communication for every single human being on the planet, expresses what a whole bunch of words never can… It’s not about how many flips, or turns, or how straight. It’s about how far you can stretch the soul.”

Wonderful, isn’t it? Who would disagree with this? I certainly don’t. The problem I have with it is not the way it promotes all forms of dance movement, it’s that its makers forget, or ignore, or are totally ignorant of the fact that voice is part of human movement.

When we make vocal sound, our bodies are also in movement and our voices, just like our hands, or hips, or any other visible part of our beings, express our human ways of being, our culture, and our souls. The only difference is that the voice is not visible.

Voice is not just the words it speaks. Words are concepts, ideas, thoughts made audible so that they can be communicated. Voice is more than the words it speaks.

Words require a mind in order to be spoken.
What is a mind?
What is speaking?

Speaking is the act of giving voice to words.
What are words?
What is a voice?

Voice is the body within the words
Voice is the soul reaching out to touch your body.

We don’t see voices with our eyes, but we don’t just hear them with our ears either. Sound waves do not flow directly out of our mouths and only land in the listener’s inner ear, thence to be translated into signals that the brain interprets. Of course that is part of the process, but there is also the part where sound waves impact upon the listener’s body. The listener is, literally, moved, in subtle but profound ways by the sound of the voice they are also hearing.

So when we train our bodies to be more expressive and communicative, please don’t forget to keep training our voices as part of that process. Give your voice a good stretch each morning, take it for a jog along its length and breadth, challenge it to leap higher, flow longer, dive deeper, twist and flip, bend and straighten. Move your voice to stretch your soul.

Do you agree? Do you have a regular physical training regime that includes vocal stretches or resistance work? Voice trainers, do you encourage your students to move around the room as they do their vocal exercises? Share your thoughts below in the comments box.

Performance Skills Training, Voice

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Clarity of Thought and how to get it

Flloyd Kennedy 27 October 2012 Theatre acting, public speaking, theatre, voice training

I once wrote a poem about trying to write a poem. It goes like this:

It’s never enough

The words inside my head

Scrambling for freedom

It’s never enough

The space between the words

Inviting interference.

It’s not enough

To know, to have, to feel.

There must be

Space

Outside my head

A clear perceptive silence

Room to manoeuvre.

stills Monday and Wednesday 216 — Tony Brockman (Jerome) and Flloyd Kennedy (June)

Then I decided to include this poem in a play about an actor who was also a poet. It became a shared moment between the actor and her grandson, a way for him to demonstratte to her that he had read her work. But as soon as we (I played the actor) began rehearsing the scene, I realised that it was also highly relevant to acting itself.

The actor who is responsible for expressing a memorised text is especially challenged, dealing with words inside the head, all vying for their turn to come out.
Every moment the actor is not actually speaking, the challenge is to stay attentive and responsive, while yet more words flit in and out of consciousness, demanding attention, adding new challenges and sometimes even trying to change the subject.
A “clear perceptive silence” is something we have to earn, and yet it is also the very thing that makes the difference between a clump of chatter and a dialogue.
The answer, then, is to own that silence, to make the text that is expressed as much about the silence as it is about the semantics of the words and phrases. I’m not suggesting great big unnecessarily long pauses. I’m talking about the space, both aural and physical, that allows language, in the form of speech, to be wholly itself.
Silence, in spoken text, is the equivalent of rests in a musical score. Without the rests, there is no room for the listener. And if we don’t want the listener to be part of what we are doing, why on earth are we doing it?
I look forward to your comments.

Theatre

Clarity of Thought and how to get it Read Post »