This week in voice traning

Back at it, after a week that was disrupted by illness and bad weather.

On Monday, we charged back into the poems. We spent a good deal of time working in the space, playing with physical responses to words and phrases. The class was ready to let go physically and had a good time with the warm up. I was preparing them for the main work of the day, which was to respond physically to the words and images of their poems.

I paired them up, somewhat randomly. I did choose to pair the drama students with each other. There are pros and cons to this tactic. Paired with non-drama students I have found that sometimes they can provide positive modeling of good speech and help their partners liberate their physical actions. On the other hand, they can be intimidating to partners who are shy. In the interests of this experiment, which I want to share with teachers in other schools without drama programs, I'm more interested in seeing how students without drama training respond to the physical action approach to voice training.

After the students were paired up, I instructed them that they would take turns voicing their poems while their partner provided suitable actions. They spent about 20 minutes working the poems and by the end of the class many of them had their poems memorized as a side effect of working on the actions.

We ended the class by taking a look at a couple of the works in progress. We observed that some of the poems worked well with one voicing and the other "acting" while other poems didn't. Students identified "first person" vs "third person." They also observed a few vocal problems such as projection and speaking too fast. I didn't let these comments become big issues, simply stating that voices are like musical instruments -- the more you practice the more the sound improves. I reassured them that we'd be doing work that would help everybody develop stronger and more effective voices and left it at that, choosing to comment more on the physical interpretations, which were uniformly clever and fun. Shel Silverstein has that effect!