Unit 23 - Developing voice for the actor

Monday 6^th November

In today’s session I was performing my final rendition of my poem. The poem that I have been working on is called ‘Bees’ and was written by Carol Anne Duffy.

In order to ensure that I was going to deliver the poem to the best of my ability, we started the session with a full warmup. This included body percussion, stretches, the intercostal diaphragmatic breathing exercise, diction exercises and tongue twisters. Carrying out all of these exercises meant that all of the muscles in my body were warm and I was ready to perform.

We then moved on to the poem. Before I performed this for the final time, I had a few minutes to run through the lines and think about all of the comments and feedback that I have been given during these sessions. This then enabled me to think about what I needed to remember when delivering the poem. The main thing that I remembered was to make sure that I wasn’t speeding through the lines as this can make it difficult for the audience to hear the lines. I then performed my final rendition of the poem and here is a video of me doing so:

I think this performance went really well and overall, I am very pleased with how it went. I remembered to slow down the pace of the delivery of the lines to ensure that each word was very clear and could be understood. I was also given some feedback from my lecturer which was that I had very clear diction because every word was very clear. I have been able to work on my diction by using the diction exercises which we use in the warm up at the start of each session – ‘pah, tah, kah’, ‘mah, nah, lah’, and ‘thah, vah, zah’. Practicing these have enabled my diction to improve especially through this unit and I have certainly noticed a difference in my deliveries. Another point that my lecturer made was that the intonation was great. I managed to use pauses to add meaning to the poem. On the other hand, something that I feel like I could have done slightly better was my projection. I have been working on my projection over the past few weeks, by using different exercises such as diaphragm kicks but also just making sure that my voice fills the full room when I am making a speech, to make sure that the delivery of the piece is the best that it can be. This may be something that I will continue to work on in the future - to ensure that all future performances, especially those that are in front of a big audience, are well projected so that all audience members are able to hear all of the speech.

After delivering my poem, I then moved on to work on my monologue. The character of which the monologue is being spoken by is very important in the delivery of this monologue. This is because this then links to the accent of which I need to speak in because there are some words in the monologue which are part of the dialect of where the monologue is set such as ‘right’, ‘happen’ and ‘like’. Therefore, the accent then links to clarity and making sure that even though the accent is still important part of the delivery, so is the diction, clarity and projection. My lecturer, Cara had the idea of me to wear a long, weighted skirt which would then make it easier for me to get into character. We then ran through the piece a few times looking at different aspects such as diction, pace, intonation and projection. However, these are still quite a challenge to work on because I am still not 100% clear with the words yet. After a few times running through, Cara gave me some feedback. Firstly, I am starting to realise the character and the comedy within the piece. Towards the end of the poem there are words such as ‘like’, ‘right’ and ‘happen’. All these words help me to grasp the accent and therefore then leads me to getting into character more. An area which I need to improve on is the middle section. At the moment this part is lacking clarity and is not grasping the audience. This may be due to me not knowing this part of the monologue as well as the other parts so I need to work on getting the words for this.