Vocal development programme: 4

This week, my focus was upon:

• 17th Century posture- Man Of Mode
• Bone prop exercise
• Breath work 

Posture:

Posture is slowly becoming something more and more important as we involve ourselves more into our restoration piece, Man Of Mode by George Etherege. Posture in the restoration period was a way of proving your social class, and so all the characters we played in the play all had to have immaculate posture in order to keep our characters well characterised.  Although posture, in this case, doesn't really come into consideration for our voices and how good our voices are, it still has a massive effect on our characters and our understanding of the development of our characters. So firstly I researched into posture in the 17th century. I wanted to understand the posture I needed to keep up throughout the play, and so with the voice and articulation/pace/projection work I have been doing could then be added into the posture work here:

 Something Sally had told us all was 'to make everything we do feel and look natural'. So the way I held myself had to look natural because at the time, it would've been the most natural thing for these characters. At home, I started off by looking at how I stood in the mirror. Observing where my shoulders sat. how my neck and head sat, how far apart my feet stood, if my hip was thrusted forward or in line with the spine. 

Image 3: Posture

I did a quick body sketch to highlight what parts of my body I am holding wrong, and it's actually a lot more than I had expected! When standing normally, my shoulders are rolled quite far forward. This used to be quite visible but I've taught myself to sit them further back, but for this specifically, they need to be a lot further back. I tilt my head ever so slightly to the right. This is just a long term habit but its always something I remind myself of when working on my posture. When relaxed, my arms sit too closely to my body. I think this is due to my shoulders being rolled too far forward, so if I realign the position of my shoulders, my arms will sit nicer. My hips just slightly pushed forward, and so therefore aren't in line with my spine and I lock my knees constantly, so having more of a bend to them will help the position of my hips. And finally, my feet could do with being placed further apart to enable my stability and to make them sit more central instead of letting them relax outwardly.

This link took me through the process of improving your posture, but mainly focussing on the neutral effect you can create for your body. Throughout the video, he talks you through various body positions,one being just a simple 'neutral spine' position, and a neutral spine in the seated position. The video talks you through all of these positions and I thought I could try them all out. Obviously I am aware of the correct posture for Man Of Mode but these are just some tips and come into practise for me. 

     In the seated neutral position, I felt comfy and it felt natural to be speaking in this position. It felt very much as though I was performing, however my neck felt awkward. For the neutral position, you have to line it up with your spine, so to me it felt a little bit out of place but apart from that it felt like a nice position. In terms of voice, I felt my voice was clear. There was nothing trapping the voice, not that that is something you can notice in your own voice anyways. I tried projecting and then whispering my lines in this position, and again it felt easy enough for my voice to do so. 

    In the standing position, it felt a little more forced. I find it tricky to remain with slightly bent knees as I tend to lock my knees, and I found  holding them unlocked for this amount of time, meant my lower back began to ache. I tried to keep my arms dangling down in a neutral and relaxed position but I found I wanted to use them as a gesture type thing; but I think I can be leanient with small aspects like so.

This was good practise for me and it gave me ways to slip into the correct posture each time I needed to. So I have decided to set this as my weekly homework, to spend about 20 minutes per week practising my posture. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCwyrA7G_0A

The posture is very much how I have been working on for these past couple weeks, and it's definitely helped a lot now that our posture is becoming something we need to work on. I feel like I can slip into this good posture a lot easier, and it becomes especially easy when I am in my costume because it's tight enough for me to keep my back straight. I also find that when I'm in costume I hold my hands in a better position. With the hip pads being at elbow's length for me, I can slightly rest my elbows on them and so my hands sit easily just infront of my stomach. 

   After working on my posture and ensuring that I looked natural stood, sitting and walking in this position, I worked on saying my lines in this position. I needed to make them work alongside each other, and it was definitely a lot easier than I had expected. Because my posture was tight and I felt very posh and upper-class, I think I could easily put my voice into this position. So it all felt natural to be doing along side each other, and I felt natural doing the two, so all-in-all it was very successful and I felt like working on my posture and then bringing my voice work into was the better was round for me, and so I feel like my basic characterisation of Mrs Loveit is coming along nicely.

Articulation/Pace:

The bone prop is a little 'prop' as such to help improve your clarity/articulation and diction of your words. It's to be "Lightly held between the teeth whilst performing articulation drills and vocal exercises - the Prop increases oral space without the need to bite down to hold it in place." http://www.themorrisonboneprop.com/about.html
As it says via this link, there are other ways of achieving the same thing, for example you can use your finger, which is the method I will be practising this week:

1. Place your index finger between your top and bottom sets of teeth

2. Without moving your tongue or your lips, recite a line. For this I spoke the line:

"I would die to satisfy that, but will not to save you from a thousand racks do a shameless thing to please your vanity"

3. Repeat the line, allowing yourself to move your tongue

4. Remove finger away from your teeth, you can now repeat the line with movement from both your tongue and lips.

I really like this exercise. To me, I can really notice the difference in my speech. Each step, you can hear the changes in your voice, obviously the first step, the vocal delivery is pretty much inaudible! As you give yourself more muscles to use to talk, the clarity of it becomes stronger as you've stretched the exact muscles in order to make it clear when you stopped the use of your tongue and lips. I figured that using this line was a little bit optimistic, it's a little bit too long to keep going for all of the steps, so on Wednesday I changed the line to:

"Horrid and ungrateful, begone and never see me more"

This was definitely a lot more effective as it gave me the opportunity to say the line more times for each step, whereas the line I had chosen beforehand was definitely a bit too long for this exercise. 

I did this exercise with a few other lines too, in order to help me along the process of improving my articulation. Over the past three weeks, I've been seeing much more of an improvement in my voice! Some vocal feedback I have received is as follows:

• Strong and very clear voice
• Make it bigger..."Belinda" needs to be bigger, and in a less angry tone
• Bring the attention back onto you
• In the asides, slow down - as though the audience is dumb!
• Pace is very good and very clear
• Articulation is good also
• 
  

Although these are only small little vocal notes, they are more of a confidence boost for me in terms of improving my voice. And although these notes are based on what Karen saw of my Man Of Mode rehearsals, I feel like my voice overall is improving, and I can see it remaining the same level when it comes to working on my monologues in the next couple of weeks. 

Projection:

For the final week of this, I wanted to incorporate projection work into the brief bits of breath control I worked on last week in order to improve my articulation/pace. Through research, I came across a very good breathing exercise to assist with my projection: https://www.theatrefolk.com/spotlights/just-breathe-breathing-exercises-for-student-actors

• Inhale fully and exhale on a vowel sound. Start quietly and build the sound throughout the exhale. Stay in control, keep the sound going for the entirety of the exhale.
• Inhale fully and exhale on a vowel sound. Start loudly and decrease your volume throughout the exhale. Stay in control, keep the sound going for the entirety of the exhale.
• Inhale fully and exhale on a vowel sound. This time move back and forth between a loud and quiet sound throughout the exhale.
• Inhale fully and exhale on a ten count going from loud to soft.
• Inhale fully and exhale on a ten count going from soft to loud.
• Stand on stage and whisper a speech. Make it a stage whisper, loud enough for someone to hear at the back of the theatre.
• This exercise is done in pairs. Everyone lines up, with the pairs facing each other. Each pair starts a conversation. After 20 seconds, tell the lines to take three steps back. The pairs must continue their conversation. After another 20 seconds, the lines take another three steps back, and so on. Discuss afterwards. Were you able to stay relaxed? What was hard about the exercise? Did you strain your voice? 

I made notes on my workings of this exercise:

This was a very effective exercise for me to do, and I wish I had come across something like this beforehand as it focusses on just working towards simple projection but with common-sense kind of exercises. I loved doing the stage whisper exercise, and for this I used my Like A Virgin monologue (by Gordon Steele) to make a pleasant change from Man Of Mode. It was nice to see how contrasting it was to then do this in a more projected manner, in comparison to the whisper. I performed this monologue to Sally this week, and she noted that my projection was a lot better than as she has seen it in our Shakespeare piece (Much Ado About Nothing.) She said it had improved significantly, and it just made me seem more confident, whether or not I was or not. In Man Of Mode, I got some really lovely vocal feedback notes in terms of my projection: 'You own your words', 'so fiery, its fab' 'you have really improved your character, she's suddenly come to life'. And from my peers, a lot mentioned how powerful I had become with Loveit, which came as a nice surprise to them, to see me in a completely different light. They also very much liked my line: "RUN I say, call him again, I will have him called" as I would tend to deliver this line extra angry and would often find my voice almost screeching out at Pert!!



Conclusion:
This past months work of weekly blogging based on vocal work has been really interesting for me. I sort of assumed that I perhaps wouldn't enjoy working on my voice so heavily, as I find it's something I push to one side when performing, which I think is the one thing that has been bringing my grades down as it's viewed as though I am not putting the effort in. However, after this past month of working so closely and intently on my voice, my opinions have changed. I think it's helped massively for me to hear that my voice was really strong during Man Of Mode, as that was something that I had become more and more apprehensive about as the performance dates loomed. So not only did doing well in that, help me to feel more confident about further improving my voice, but it also inspired me to work harder on my voice and experiment with it and see how by doing odd things such as changing my posture can affect my voice, and then working out how I was to keep my posture and then incorporate my well-articulated Loveit voice to this position etc.
   I can definitely see the improvement on my voice, and not only did I and others see this during Man Of Mode, but I also saw it during my monologues assessment. The loudness of my performances now just brings more life to my pieces and gives me a confident vibe- and because of this, it coats over my nerves, but doesn't view me in a big headed way. So all-in-all this months worth of vocal work has been extremely, extremely benefical for me and I aimed indefinitely to keep up this regular work to my voice, in order to continue improving it in the ways I have so recently done with the likes of Man Of Mode and 'Auditions For Actors'.