Unit 23 - Developing voice for the actor

Monday 2^nd October

To start off the session today, I ran through my warmup with my lecturer, Cara whilst relating back to the warmup notes that I have made. I have planned this warmup especially for a voice workshop and will run through the warmup in a few weeks time with my peers. In the meantime, I need to produce some notes which will be able to help me whilst leading the warmup. During the warmup, I need to have clarity whilst speaking and make sure that I apply all of the diction techniques whilst guiding the group through the warmup. I also need to be clear in the instructions that I give so that it is easy for the group to follow. I also need to understand why I have chosen to carry out the exercises which I have chosen and make sure that the group are also aware of these reasons. At the end of the session, I will also guide the group through a short cool down.

After we had finished going through the warmup, we ran through both of my contrasting pieces. The 2 pieces which I have chosen to do are a poem called ‘Bees’ by Carol Ann Duffy and an extract taken from the play ‘Hindle wakes’. Here are some videos of my starting points:

At the end of the videos, my lecturer gave me some feedback on how I presented the pieces. A main piece of feedback that she gave me for both of the pieces was that I wasn’t really applying any diction techniques or projection. This was because I am still learning the pieces so I am focusing on recall but mainly because I was ill with a sinus infection in this lesson which meant that I couldn’t really project a lot and I couldn’t really hear how loud I was speaking because my ears were blocked.

I have started to learn these pieces but they are still very new to me so my ongoing target is to keep on looking at these pieces to ensure that I can learn them as soon as possible.

There are a few different reasons as to why these 2 pieces are contrasting. Firstly, the piece ‘Bees’ is a poem whereas ‘Hindle wakes’ is a monologue taken from a script. Another contrasting element is that the poem includes a lot of alliteration making it soft and fluid throughout the whole piece. Although the monologue is fluid, it is much more abrupt and uses quite harsh terms.