Use your voice to find out more

The Words of Wisdom this week are Use your voice to find out more. More about the character you are playing and more about your capabilities in relation to it.

When you are working on a part, unless a particular dialect has been called for, you will probably start off using something close to your normal accent and tone of voice. It's easy to get locked in to this and fail to explore the full extent of what the character might be about and how you might be able to deliver it. To avoid this, take a section of the text and vocalise it in different ways, for example:

Sing it (in any style)
Growl it
Moan and groan it
Bark it, aggressively
Change the pitch, up or down
Speed it up
Slow it down
Smile all the time you are speaking
Murmur it
Whisper it
Look in a mirror, trying to outstare yourself
Use a lot of meaningful gesture
Talk on the edge of tears
Laugh out loud

It is worthwhile taking time over this exercise. Listen to what is happening with your voice. How does it feel, physically? Emotionally?

If you work on it receptively you will find things you didn't know were there.

Use your head

The Words of Wisdom this week are Use your head. It’s quite impossible to speak without moving your head but most head movement is completely unconscious. Study people in life and on television. Notice how they all use their head movements to amplify what they are saying and the way they respond to other people’s speech. Observe how head movement may express assent, affirmation, negativity, doubt, explanation, recollection and all sorts of complexities of them and much more. See how head movements associate with gaze, facial expression, gesture and words. By becoming aware of all this you can harness a tool which you can use to make your own performances stronger and showing greater complexity. Use your head.

Use your eyes

Let’s hope the unseasonably sunny weather continues, though perhaps it might relent a little on Sunday, when the London Marathon looks like being run in conditions warm enough to be difficult to cope with. However, our classes continue as normal and I hope the fine weather will encourage a few more people to turn out, both on Thursday and on Saturday. If you haven’t been for a while, they are drop-in classes and one of their delights is that we never know who is going to surprise us and reappear, so don’t be shy about coming along.

And the Words of Wisdom this week: Use your eyes! When we look at people we look at their eyes. When they look at us they look at our eyes. We read people’s eyes and we signal with our eyes and we are wonderfully skilful at interpreting people’s character and mood from a momentary scanning of those few square centimetres in the upper part of their face. Gaze is a more fundamental channel of communication than spoken language: we can communicate with people who do not speak a word of our language by using the expression of our eyes. We can even communicate with some species of our animal cousins in the same way: the language of gaze is pre-human. So, especially on screen or in small scale theatre, actors should use their eyes and lead with their eyes. When you watch a film, note how often the most powerful shots are the reaction shots, where a character is not speaking at all. One look can be worth a thousand words so … use your eyes!