Unit 23 - Developing voice for the actor

Thursday 19^th October

Today I was taking the group through a full voice production warmup ready for the lesson ahead as we were going to have a very busy session working on our performance for the Theatre in Education unit. Here is a video of me carrying out the warmup:

As you can see from the video, I took my group through quite a lot of different exercises which made sure that the whole body was warm. It is very important to warm up the whole body in a voice warmup and not just warm up the areas which the voice uses because there are lots of different areas used within voice production which we may not even think about. The different exercises that I took the group through were:

·     Body percussion

·     Warming up the shoulders and the neck

·     Intercostal diaphragmatic breathing exercise

·     Abdominal press exercise (extension of the intercostal diaphragmatic breathing exercise)

·     Humming and EE OO

·     Diction exercises

·     Consolidation exercises

·     Tongue twisters

I made some notes prior to the lesson which I followed during the warmup to make sure that I didn’t forget any of the exercises because they are all very important.

During the warmup and which is evident in the video, my performing arts lecturer Cara asked me a few questions. I was able to answer all of these questions confidently and correctly.

Overall, I feel like I led this warmup really well. I followed and stuck to the notes that I had made prior to the lesson. I was worried that I wouldn’t use good projection and clear instructions during the warmup when delivering the instructions. However, when I have looked back at the video, you can hear my voice clearly and the group were able to follow the instructions throughout the warmup so I therefore know that my instructions were clear. The feedback from my lecturer was that I carried out the warmup well and fluidly. I explained all of the exercises really well so that the group could follow. A point for improvement would be to correct members of the group if they were doing something wrong for example correcting someone on their posture or if they can’t quite say one of the diction exercises correctly, go over it slowly with them.