Losing my own voice

Lesson plans have been interrupted as I came down with a nasty voice-debilitating bug.

I expect to be back at it tomorrow.

Putting the word in your body

Last Friday, we did a traditional Friday at the Improv session. I taught them What are you doing? A game that frustrates, but keeps them involved whether they are on stage or observing.

This week, I'm starting with movement and using words from their individual poems. We will get to the group poems at some point this week.

We started today with the basic Balancing the Space exercise, one of the greatest gifts given to me by the folks in New World Performance Laboratory.

We move in the space, taking care to keep it balanced. Actors must stay constantly aware in order to move into the next available empty space. As each actor moves, another empty space opens up. Vision and hearing become heightened as one works to achieve the balance.

Then we move into responding to words in oppositional pairs: Crooked vs Straight; Slow vs Fast, Wide vs Narrow, Low vs Tall and so on. After exploring the extremes, we find the steps from slowest to fastest or most crooked to straightest, using a scale of numbers from one to ten make the adjustments.

Next I asked them to find one word from their individual poems, and create a walk movement pattern that fits the word. They all balance the space, working their words. We then play follow the leader, taking turns to reveal the individual word patterns and allow everybody to try them on for size.

Each student then shows her/his individual movement before the class and we try to guess the word. After all the words are revealed, we finally bring sound into the space by playing Word Tennis. In pairs, they toss one of the words back and forth, using their movement pattern to "toss" the word to their partner. For example, the actor with "backward" as a word, propels it with a flick of her hip with back to partner. The actors are exploring sound shapes and velocities without prompting. It comes out of the word. No one appears shy or scared. Projection happens without prompting.

This was a good class today!

Cold readings

All went as planned today with the cold readings of Shel Silverstein poems. I videotaped them and had time to have write in their journals:

Name one thing you like about your voice.

What would you like to work on in improving your voice?

Tomorrow, we will try a group poem. I will record that and then not do any recording for a couple of weeks while running them through some physical/vocal work and games.

Performing poetry

I'm counting on Shel Silverstein's poetry to make tomorrow fun for the kids, while I put them through the torture of cold readings. In order to get a baseline starting point for voice work, I will give them each a different short Silverstein poem to read on stage before the rest of the class and the digital camcorder.

I'd like to get through the class twice. The first time, I hand them the poem as they go up to the stage. The second time, they will have had the poem in hand for the duration of the class, so we will see if going over it in the mind leads to improvement.

I picked some slightly longer/more difficult poems to give to the 7 drama students in this class. The way they approach their poems may very well provide modeling for the rest of the class -- we shall see what happens.

On Friday, we'll do the same thing with a group poem, recording the first read through, then work it for the period and record it after one session. Eventually, the students will be working out actions to their solo poems and the group poems with a goal of performing them before the entire school during our morning auditorium time.

Day One in Exploratory Drama

The class arrived and I did my traditional first day activities, which begin with guided tours of the Little Theatre. I let my drama students take the other kids round and about, sharing rules and procedures and memories as they act as tourist guides. In this particular exploratory class, there are 7 drama students. The rest are a mixture of dance, visual art, vocal and instrumental music.

After the tours, I kept them in the same groupings and appointed the drama students as talk show hosts. They were to come up with a series of questions to interview the rest of their group members. The interviewees are not to act a role, but to be themselves and answer questions that give me more of an idea who they are.

Questions included: What is your art area? What school did you come from before ours? What's your favorite color/food/music? And so on.

I videotaped the interviews to get an initial "sounding" from each student. The vocal skills on display today ranged from strong to weak and everything in between.

On Thursday and Friday, I'm going to record them doing cold readings of some enjoyable poetry -- probably Shel Silverstein. This will be their base line recording to compare their work to at the end of the 9 weeks.

In 4/5 and 6 drama classes today, I experimented with some vocal/movement exercises that I will use down the line with this exploratory class.

One exercise involved moving in the space, adapting and changing physically to a given word or phrase such as: grumpy, afraid, disgusted, exhilerated, bored and so on. Then after they were warmed up with that exercise I added in make a sound along with your movement that is inspired by the word. After they worked through several words, I had them play my Take it to Another game, in which the group is spaced throughout the working space. One student begins it by moving across the space toward another actor while doing a movement and sound pattern. They must continue the sound/movement until facing another actor and making eye contact. The receiving actor must stay in neutral mode -- no laughing or breaking up. The receiving actor upon making eye contact, takes off with her sound/movement until face to face with a new receiving actor and so on until the entire group has had an opportunity to move.

The benefit of this exercise is that the instructor and students get to focus on each individual and observe how they carry out the exercise. One can see immediately who is eye contact shy and who is having difficulty staying in neutral mode. Also one can learn a great deal from the quality of the sounds and the movements. Some are very stiff or timid. Others give evidence of a sense of rhythm and timing, while some display fluidity and creativity.

Today it was interesting to notice how the sound worked with the movement. Some were thoroughly integrated while in others the sound and movement seemed to be working against each other. I will be looking to see how this exercise changes over the course of the technique work we will be getting in to later on.

In my 6th class, this work is leading into gibberish games, while in 4/5 it is preparing them for puppetry. Puppetry is great for stimulating creative voice work.

New Semester

Tomorrow marks the beginning of the second semester, and I have a brand new exploratory drama class to work with for 9 weeks.

My plan is to review the process I have been developing in the first semester. I am going to zero in on process that involves physical actions and voice training. I will be trying to keep it do-able in a regular classroom setting and flexible enough to fit within any academic subject area.

I will assess the new group by recording them reading from a text -- solo and as a group before beginning any theatre work with them.

At the end of the nine weeks, I will repeat the recording process to assess for individual and collaborative speaking improvement. In addition, I will be asking the class's homeroom teacher to make note of any improvements she observes within her classroom.

I plan to blog my daily lessons here over the course of this class.

Time out for inspiration

I spent an exhilarating weekend out of town, meeting up with two theatre people who have provided inspiration over the years. This gave me an opportunity to discuss my critical links ideas for improving voice training with my trusted former colleagues and collaborators.

My actor friend told me of a fellow in his company who had a voice that was lacking in flexibility, but was able to pass the audition without the director being able to identify the problem ahead of time. Speculation is that the actor had major coaching for his audition piece, but once cast did not have a clue how to speak the Shakespearean character he was assigned to play.

The actor's problem was that he was trapped within his own voice/dialect. His bad speech habits infected his acting to the point that every role would sound the same, and not a pleasant sound as I heard it described. Yet, this actor had been able to take on another voice for one audition. This situation is fascinating, as it is taking place on a professional level. Certainly one sees/hears this sort of thing at the amateur level quite a bit. It becomes a great challenge to correct habitual speech patterns. The younger the actor, the more chance you have of making it a total change from poor to quality speech.

I also spent time with my friend Terry, who is a fellow theatre educator, now teaching in a high school in the state of NY. We spent some quality hours sharing ideas, experiences, lows and highs of theatre teaching. His energy and talent have inspired me from the first time we ever sat down to talk theatre a few short years ago. We are on the same wave length in terms of theatre theory and practice and it is always a joy to brain storm with him.

I advocated that he join the Educational Theatre Association, as it can only enhance his program. He's only been at this school for a year and a half and has had a whole lot to put together in a short time, but I'm sure he will find EdTA and the International Thespian Society will provide resources and experiences that he will find invaluable.

Physical voice training

It seems to me that many people are detached from their voices. They open their mouths, sounds come out, but they have little awareness of how much they could do to enhance the quality.

I've been having students put their hands on their faces to feel the muscles working.

My mime and mask movement teacher, Leonard Pitt, always had us make sounds when we worked on our actions. There are some movements I cannot do without summoning the sounds we used to make in his class. I've found that my students are now similarly infected! I need to explore the sound/action connections with more depth and attentiveness. Certainly, the sounds enhance the respiration and strengthen lung power.

Voices from fall

So what actually went down in the fall semester? No grandiose experiments to bring about instant mindfulness. The school theme for the year is "Voices." For me, that meant work on vocal technique -- especially in 4/5 drama and the 4 - 6 exploratory classes. The younger the student, the more chance there is of making a lasting contribution to voice and communication skills.

In fifth grade, each 9 week class ended with a morning performance of some kind of group poem with actions. To simply stand still and recite did not appeal, nor did I think it would improve student vocal technique.

4/5 worked with Edward Lear poetry. The whole class worked on The Jumblies, and each individual student was given two Lear limericks to perform solo vocally, but with a partner to provide actions to the speaker's words. Separating voice and action was a useful exercise in that the young actors got to test individual skills yet be with a partner within the performance. Not nearly so scary, which is a boost for collaboration skill training as well.

For me, as teacher, I finally got a handle on working with such a large class. 39 students in 4/5 drama makes it difficult to observe each student for a good length of time. Groups of 3 and 4 at the beginning of the year were not as productive as groups of 6 and 7. Or perhaps the early work would have been more difficult no matter what size groups, since more than half of the class is new to the school this year. Regardless, it is getting easier to work with them, but I haven't had time for a notebook check since mid fall, nor have I been giving them notebook assignments. When we worked on the Lear poetry, it was intensive rehearsing for several weeks on end. I need to get some response and reflect time into the routine.

You know your idea is stupid when...

...somebody makes fun of your high-falutin' words on another blog. A blogger was complaining about how she keeps seeing "mindfulness" referred to all over the place and wondered why we don't want to use "pay attention" instead. (Sorry I can't remember which blog this came from.) The question is a good one and worth examining.

Wikipedia gives us a rundown on the term mindfulness. It has a direct connection to the art of acting in its initial definition.

"Mindfulness (Pali: Sati; Sanskrit:smṛti स्मृति ) is a technique in which a person becomes intentionally aware of their thoughts and actions in the present moment, non-judgmentally..."

Where it gets tricky is in the religious/spiritual connections, and interesting within the psychological realm. Yet, what I really want to look at is this (from the same entry):

"...mindfulness does not have to be constrained to a formal meditation session. Mindfulness is an activity that can be done at any time; it does not require sitting, or even focusing on the breath, but rather is done by bringing the mind to focus on what is happening in the present moment, while simply noticing the mind's usual "commentary".

The following is a possible description of what it is to act a role (in performance situations).:

"One can be mindful of the sensations in one's feet while walking, of the sound of the wind in the trees, or the feeling of soapy water while doing dishes."

The big difference is that the actor is being mindful of the sensations and thoughts of another character's mind. It is kind of a super-mindfulness or double mindfulness. Or perhaps it is more like those Russian dolls that nest one within the next. Within the actor, lives a character who also may be playing one or more roles within the circumstances of the performance.

Looking at a performance, we never want to see the actor acting. We want to believe that the character is alive before us, responding to the situation, the environment, and the other characters.

Here are some concrete examples of an actor not succeeding at mindfulness:

1. Breaking character by laughing or apologizing for a mistake.
2. Allowing habitual gestures to creep into a characterization.
3. Blocking another performer.
4. Dropping a prop or tripping over something on stage.
5. Eyes drifting in a direction that does not further the story or inner development.
6. Cutting off someone's line or not picking up cues quickly enough.

Better late than never

As a participant in the Critical Links Theatre project, we were asked to keep a diary of our process. Here I am four weeks before the February meeting, finally putting my mind to the task of looking for the critical links in my teaching process.

To review, last fall, twelve theatre teachers from all over Ohio met in Cincinnati to enter into a heightened engagement with our work in class and on stage. Over the course of a weekend, we participated in a sequence of stimulating exercises that were designed to focus us on our teaching with the goal of coming up with an Inquiry to pursue.

It looks like this:

1. Create a learning community
2. Develop a question for inquiry
3. Create an inquiry plan
4. Collect evidence
5. Share initial findings
6. Organize and weigh evidence
7. Share conclusions from inquiry

At the end of the weekend, I had a question for inquiry. I'm looking at it right now and I think it is completely stupid! It is too broad and too vague. So I'm going to throw all that out and think about my theatre teaching process as we end the first semester this fall and then come up with a more focused inquiry for the next semester.