Yesterday, I went along to ASU with my friend and colleague Associate Professor Micha Espinosa, to attend her advanced voice class at ASU.

What a joy!  With a mat, a small zafu and a small yellow ball, for two hours we rolled, relaxed, observed, breathed, voiced, observed, sighed, trembled, stretched and relaxed some more. This was Fitzmaurice Voicework par excellence, with Micha’s personal injection of joy and intensity.  Like most Fitzmaurice teachers, Micha incorporates and adapts exercises from other methodologies and invents her own as the need arises.  It was wonderful to allow myself to relax into student/performer mode, and indulge myself in the activities.

The next class was a group of 20 undergraduate students, a beginners’ class, and unfortunately for her, but luckily for me, the scheduled teacher had a bad bout of laryngitis, so I was invited to run the class.  I introduced them to Ira Seidenstein’s Core Mechanics,  and my version of the Vocal Function exercises.

Time and time again I found myself quoting Dame June Bloom, rephrasing my own character creation, as I explained the function and purpose of the various exercises, the relevance to performance itself – as against just being an exercise.  Hopefully some of the students will be encouraged to come and enjoy the Thunder’s Mouth Theatre show at the Phoenix Fringe.

I now realise all the links to my handouts were broken when I transferred this blog over from WordPress.com to my own hosted site with WordPress.org.  It will take me a while to get them all back up, but in the meantime, here are the Core Mechanics.