acting – Page 7 – Being in Voice

Fresh Voice! The Acting Class 2012

Flloyd Kennedy 15 August 2012 Performance Skills Training acting, audition coaching, creativity, Flloyd Kennedy, Shakespeare, training, voice, voice training for actors, warmup, workshop

The next block of voice and acting classes will take place on Sunday mornings, from 9.30 am to 12.30 pm.

7th October – 25th November

The Voice Class integrates pure voicework with physicality, creative expression and performance technique.

The Voice Class works with the movement of breath in the moving body, to facilitate passionate, nuanced, intelligent self-expression and communication. The overall objective is BEING consistently and totally present IN the act of sounding the VOICE. Join us for seven three hour sessions, exploring your vocal potential with and without text. Contemporary and classic texts.

“How wonderful is the human voice! It is indeed the organ of the soul!” Longfellow

Pure voice, vocal maintenance, storytelling, public speaking, audition monologues, text analysis

Cost: 7 (3 hour) sessions: $360
(Earlybird – pay before 30 August 2012 – $320)

Contact Flloyd to enquire.

Flloyd’s work has been influenced by some of the world’s foremost voice and theatre practitioners, including Valerii Galendiev of The Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg, Anna Petrova of the Moscow Art Theatre School, Krszysztov Miklasewski, Frankie Armstrong, Kristin Linklater, Harriet Buchan (Roy Hart work), Marcia McCallum, Catherine Fitzmaurice, Ira Seidenstein (Quantum Clown) and Tim Smith (Vocal Alchemy)

“Flloyd is a committed and passionate advocate for the power of the actor. Her knowledge of the literature, theory, practice, and history of the theatre (and of the use of the voice in particular) is deep and comprehensive. Working with Flloyd is like hanging out with an old and dearly loved friend, a friend who will help you to improve and inspire you to greater creativity with laughter and a fierce love of the art form.” John Graham

“Flloyd is a fantastic actress and director… which naturally lends its way to her being a brilliant teacher. I’ve worked with Flloyd as a director first, then I had the opportunity to share the stage with her! But I mostly loved working with her as a student through her Archetypes and Being in Voice classes. She encourages you to explore your imagination through movement and voice. She actually pulls your voice inside out so that you are not only using your “voice”, but the voice within that wants to rise to the surface! I miss her and her classes, very much and only wish I could steal her away from Brissy, and permanently place her in Houston, Texas!” Lyndsay Sweeney

“The penny dropped, and I realised that voice work is not a ‘nice to have’, but the foundation on which is built any hope of connecting with an audience”

“What Flloyd teaches has relevance beyond conventional theatre and acting, it can be applied in so many ways and walks of life”

“I was so impressed with the amount of info covered – the biology, theory, research, a huge range of vocal exercises, and then to integrate this so well with performance, authenticity, playfulness and mindfulness on stage.”

“Thank God for Flloyd and her classes! Inspiring, fun and challenging… I would recommend these classes to any actor”

“If you live in Brisbane join up!! It’s the most fun and beneficial thing an actor can do for voice, imagination and body!”

As well as vocal function, and vocal maintenance, we will explore our full vocal range with techniques of lamentation and many different singing techniques. We will also examine how we use our voices to share our inner lives, and to invite others to see the world the way we see it, in the present moment, through a learned text.

At the end of the seven sessions, you will be ready to audition – if that is what you wish to do.

You don’t need to be an experienced actor, or a singer, to benefit from and enjoy this work. On the other hand, professional actors, singers and voice users will find the work refreshing and invigorating.

Performance Skills Training

Fresh Voice! The Acting Class 2012 Read Post »

Doing it anyway, in the face of fear

Just watched a very disturbing Ted Talk, in which the speaker proposes that if we all lose our fear of failure we can change the world – and that’s all you have to do. She’s speaking from the position of working with one of the world’s best funded Defence research institutions, where the failure concerned doesn’t seem to have any personal consequences other than the odd night of disturbed sleep.

As for the rest of us, especially performers, fear of failure generally involves more than that. First and foremost there is the fear of looking like an idiot in front of an audience. There’s the financial cost, the time and energy lost as well as the disappointment that can be caused to friends, colleagues and loved ones when a project fails.

So let’s look at what ‘failure’ means, in the artistic sense. As a general rule, it means that the aim of the project was not realised. Either it was not well enough executed, or well enough promoted, or well enough realised in any way, shape or form to be well received, or well remunerated, or both. Maybe the originating idea was doomed from the start, being not well enough developed.

How can you tell, before you start, whether an idea is well enough developed? The simple answer is, you can’t. So here I agree with Ms Dugan, that fear of failure is not a good enough reason to not go ahead with developing an idea. However, let us look at the underlying assumptions that she fails to mention. What factors are essential to have in place, to justify attempting some “impossible” task or dream:

1 the necessary skills and training to be able to understand why you have failed

2 the necessary resources to at least take the project far enough to be able to learn something useful from the attempt

3 TOTAL COMMITMENT

And of course, it is No 3 that she is wanting to inspire in her listeners.

No disagreement there. I speak as someone who has lived most of my life with fear of failure. Then one day I found myself performing, just for a tiny fraction of a second, with TOTAL COMMITMENT. It was shocking, exhilarating and revelatory. It took me another twenty years to learn how to have those moments with something approaching consistency, and I ain’t there yet!

So I agree, it is not failure that is the problem. As Ms Dugan proposes, fear of failure is the problem. For a performer, holding back, just a tiny little bit, will almost inevitably ensure failure. And by failure, I don’t mean that you won’t get work, that you won’t create interesting work. I mean you won’t be working to your full potential, and you will miss out on the satisfaction and the thrill that goes along with it, and you’ll be short-changing your audiences.

David Mamet points out in his little book True and False : Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor. (1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997) that what audiences really respond to is the courage of the performer. That doesn’t mean we should show them how brave we are. It is not our job to make them admire us. Our job, as creative artists, is to share our innermost selves, in the act of communicating whatever text or action the production requires, with total honesty, and to allow the audience to make up their own minds about what we are sharing. If they don’t like it, or respond to it, that’s their prerogative. Performing with skill, imagination, intelligence and TOTAL COMMITMENT is our job. When we succeed in doing that, there is no failure.

So fear of failure is pretty much a given in our line of work. Doing it anyway is our job.