Vocal workshop

Vocal Workshop

The voice is the most important tool for an actor, It lets us say our lines and is the first element for expression we have, sadly silent films went out of fashion in the late 1920's.
In our vocal workshop we focused on our dictation and pacing.

The exercise below helps you with making sure that you are dictating your words properly by focusing on the way they sound. When doing this though you need to make sure that you are speaking from your stomach and not your chest. You can check this by keeping one hand on your stomach and make sure when you breathe in it rises and then when you breathe out that it comes back in. Also you need to avoid glottal shots when holding out the pronunciation.

Consonants

• Ca, Ga
• Le, Ne, De, Te
• Ma, Pa, Ba, Baa

Vowels 

• Oo, Oh, Ore

When working on your articulation you need to make sure you are asking yourself the following questions;

1. Are you speaking clearly?
2. Have you put on a voice (forcing it)?
3. Are you moving the voice?

We also worked on dictation and pacing with some poems in our workshop, performing a few lines of them in our natural voices in front of the class. We had to do them naturally so that no one would go into the mode of how poetry is widely considered to be read, with a clear, upper-class accent. Because we did them in our own voices and not overplayed it was a lot harder to be truthful within the moment and had to embody the words and the lines we were saying.

The overall feedback that we were given by our tutor was that a lot of us were flat and monotone, giving each line equal weight. We need to have more energy throughout the lines and not be so inhibited meaning rushing to finish our lines by not pacing ourselves which in turn creates glottal shots in our voices.