Unit 23 - Developing voice for the actor

Monday 9^th October

Today I was focusing on running through my 2 contrasting pieces which I will be performing as part of this unit. I have been taking some time to learn these 2 pieces and I am now starting to remember them.

To start off the session I ran through my warmup with Cara which I will be taking the rest of the group through next week. This week I will have a practice run through the warmup just to make sure that I am ready for next week.

For the rest of the session I was focusing on my pieces. The pieces that I am doing are a poem called ‘Bees’ and a monologue which is taken from the play ‘Hindle wakes’. Here is a video of me going through my poem and receiving some comments from my lecturer at the end:

As you can see from the video I am almost secure with the words. There was only one point in the poem where I made a mistake. During my delivery, I was mostly focusing on remembering the words and wasn’t really focusing on the delivery element. This meant that I wasn’t really thinking about projection and intonation but when I become more confident with the words, I will then spend time working on these. At the end of the video, my lecturer Cara gives me some feedback which is really helpful and I will take into consideration for the next time I deliver the poem. Some key pointers that she gave me were:

·     The start of the poem needs to be more dynamic. As the poem goes on it builds up dynamic but this needs to be from the start.

·     More projection is needed throughout the whole poem.

·     Need to watch and improve on annunciation.

·     The second stanza had a good delivery so this needs to occur in the first stanza too.

·     The whole poem needs to be slowed down.

·     Refer to the punctuation.

·     Make the most of the alliteration.

We then moved on to look at the monologue. I am still currently learning this so we didn’t really work on anything technical because we were mainly focusing on recalling the text. I did however look at adding a bit of movement to the piece but I did this naturally. I also added some intonation into the piece but this was natural too.

Once we had finished working on the monologue, we carried out some diaphragm kicks. These will help with my projection and delivery of my pieces. Here is a video of me carrying out the exercise:

I find this exercise really difficult as the sound has to come from your diaphragm. However, the more that I practiced this, the better I became and if I practice these often enough then I will start to see a difference in the way I deliver my pieces.

My target for the next week is to carry on learning and going over these pieces so that we can start to work more on the delivery.