My Voice Portfolio

I am analysing the vocal characteristics of my voice using feedback I have gathered from friends and family and teacher who have been present during my performances, during class or have formulated a response about my general speaking voice outside of acting.

Some basic characteristics of my voice are from feedback from family members are:

• Baritone
• Clear
• Modulates
• Slightly breathy 

A positive of my voice during performance is that I have good inflection of the lines. Evidence of this is that during the Cherry Orchard and the line;

'you're brother Leonid here tells me I'm a bore and a 'salesmen''

I have good inflection in this line because; before the show, I straightened my posture, became aware or my tension and relaxed said tension. This made my diaphragm relaxed and more flexible, in turn allowing me to control my breathing and increase my breath capacity, therefore giving me greater control of the tone I chose to inflict upon at the end of the line and during the words, 'bore' and 'salesmen'. This allowed me to accurately portray the attitude Alexander was using to sarcastically talk about Leonid and therefore allows the audience to understand the intentions of the character, adding to the naturalism my voice had.

Another positive aspect of my voice is that I am clear, well articulated and have a quote; 'booming'  voice which I was told by my peers during feedback. Evidence of this is during the Cherry Orchard;

'the cherry orchard is mine'

where I had to portray an exited, overly happy and purposefully ignorant Alexander who was celebrating his purchase of the cherry orchard. In order to achieve this I made sure I maintained good posture, moved my breath into the lower area of my body and relaxed the muscles in my face by massaging the jaw and carrying out a small exercise  which I involved opening and closing the mouth. This warmed my body up and allowed my voice to be 'booming' but gave me the control I needed to keep clear articulation of the words and to also portray the emotion by inflicting different tones at the ends of lines. These combined allowed the audience to clearly hear my character and enabled the emotion to be heard through the words.

These two positives show how my voice is an effective tool for portraying the right emotions to the audience in a naturalistic play by being clear, well articulated and using intonations when necessary to enhance my performance.

A negative characteristic of my voice is that it can be very monotonous and deep when reading a line that I am un certain about such as this line in my monologue;

'the monistic life only comes alive when contemplating its toilet arrangements.'

This issue occurs when I do not understand the context or meaning or emotion I am meant to be portraying during the line and therefore this lack of understanding shows in my voice by monotone. I would describe it as being a similar situation to a learner driver driving slowly and carefully because they are unsure of the road and the vehicle. With my line, it is the same, I am unsure of the lines meaning and therefore take it slow and careful which involves ignoring the use of dynamics in my voice much like a first time driver has no dynamics during a gear change. This lack of dynamics leads to the line being boring and un interesting and all of the impact or naturalism or characterisation to be lost which could really show during a performance to the audience. In order to improve on this, when I read through the script, I mark all of the new thoughts and assign an emotion to them so when I come to a line I know exactly how to act it and exactly what tones and pitches I need to use. This works because my confidence increases and I become familiarised with the lines meaning and am able to portray it successfully.

'In the language of an actor, to know is synonymous with to feel'  -  Stanislavsky - I believe this quote represents my point above by me not knowing the line effected my voice. http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/54455.Konstantin_Stanislavski


Another negative characteristic of my voice is that I can become breathy which is caused by breath being pulled back into my throat instead of being used to strengthen my vocals. This can lead to lack of stage presence as although I have the power to project my voice out to the audience, at the ends of lines the breath can become weak and quite which stops me from having control over my projection and the dynamics. Evidence for this is from a line in my monologue from the 'History Boys';

'but what are these modern-day pilgrims gazing at but these same ancient rags, hallowed not by saintly usage, its true, but by time... and time alone?'

It is in long sentences like this one where I can become breathy. I believe to improve this I can carry out an exercise that increase my breath capacity such as taking a deep breath, holding it in for 10 seconds and releasing the breath whilst maintaining the equilibrium between the posture and relaxing the tension points and increasing the amount of seconds with each breath in.

Practitioners and Exercises

• Stanislavsky - http://stansmethods.blogspot.co.uk/2007/05/stans-physical-warm-up.html

A suitable warm up exercise routine to improve my voice would be to; rotate the head in from side to side which stretches the neck muscles relieving tension and increasing motion, massaging the jaw and opening and closing it to expand the range of motion of the jaw to increase projection, moving down from the jaw to rotating the shoulders to increase motion and to relieve tension making my body more relaxed and bettering the posture making my breath more efficient, banging on the chest to massage the ribs and to open up the lungs which increases the airflow and therefore allows for more projection and dynamics such as intonation, inflection and modulation, then breathing into my abdomen and opening up my diaphragm to increase the airflow more giving me greater breath control and power in the voice which will allow me to control my articulation and, tone and pitch. Then stretching every muscle from the foot to the neck by tensing it and relaxing it which releases excess tension and makes the body more relaxed which in turn increases the efficiency of airflow and increases the dynamics of my voice. Then, moving onto some verbal exercises, take a deep breath in and pronounce some consistent sounds such as 'TH' 'F' 'M' and 'S' sounds. This will improve the articulation and get the lips warmed up increasing strength in the mouth and giving me more control over my pronunciation and execution of letters. Carrying out this exercise at home once a day and before a performance will allow me to perfect my characteristics and warm my voice up so I can perform; with high quality, naturalism, Greek theatre, Berkoff, Shakespeare and Brecht.

To Conclude

Overall, my vocal characteristics contain many aspects necessary for the many different performance types and is a very strong tool I have at my disposal as an actor but it has also highlighted to the areas of my voice I need to improve on so I can have a professionally developed voice during my performances and with my research, I now know the exercise and practice I must execute on a daily basis, to make these improvements come to life.

The Oresteia - The Chorus Speaks; Blog

Blog Report

In week one we were given an insightful introduction to Greek tragedy of which was helped by my contextual research on the history of the ancient Greeks. We studied the use of voice in a chorus group and how there are many different ways to read the script in Greek theatre. One way to read the script was to have everyone read at the same time. The outcome of this was a very un organised clutter of mixed pitched voices which, in my opinion, gave me the impression that I was in a church and we were reading a prayer or we were part of a cult group who chant and repeat. This gave me the emotions of eeriness, evilness and creepiness but also sadness and loss and as thought the voices were trying to fill up a hollow whole of which life has escaped from. These stirrings that I felt from just this reading showed how effective the chorus can be even for one line. This; in turn, shows how the use of voice can create power and impact the audience. If I were to contemporaries this I may adapt the setting of a funeral where there has been a death and folk are mourning which would relate to the emotions it made me feel but maybe physicalize the dropping of the coffin into the ground by having one person as the coffin and the rest of the group being the rope lowering the coffin into the 'dirt'. This visual, initial response I had could use Frantic Assembly's lift which would also be a contemporary use of physicality in an otherwise ancient form of theatre,

Following on from the above, we were put into groups and given a scene where we had to use physicality and voice which we have previously been educated upon in order to contextually contemporaries the script of which we would be conjointly performing in nothing shorter than a weeks time.  We were given scene 1 which is about the voices or conscience inside Orestes  mind spearing him onto killing his mother due to her and her lover murdering Orestes father.

'Let all who have prayed for justice'

We read through the script and highlighted the key words we thought were most suited to being physicalized whilst representing what was happening in each line. For the first line in our script we chose the word 'prayed' because Orestes may have begged or prayed for justice to be carried out against his mother for what she did to his father. To show this we all walked around the room and became someone who was praying for something to happen, we collaborated together and crouched down while still praying. This gave a really clear representation of prayer but I decided, to make it more visually impacting, to stand up, spread my arms out. I actually visualised the Christ The Redeemer statue in Brazil. With this line physicalized, we needed to decide how we would speak. Ideas such as whisperings, prolonged usage of the 'ssss' sound and over exaggeration were a thought, but I believe Katrina or James came up with the idea of speaking like a 'common' school child using 'chavy' accents to read the line. We experimented and decided on the school kid accent and used it throughout the scene. In my opinion, I believe that sounding like school kids in a play which is about murder and death makes the experience for the audience very disturbing and creepy which would formulate an interesting reaction with the audience. This shows how we are contemporising the script for our modern day, teenage target audience.
Further contemporising our scene physicality and voice, we decided to not just sound like school children but to become school children throughout. We created an introduction to our scene which is set in a school playground. We experimented with what we could do in the space and how we could set the scene and we decided to have school bags, walk to the back of the stage and place our bags down. We played with slow motion when rising back up from the crouching position. I believe that this worked really well in showing the setting is in a modern day school playground which shows how we have further contemporised the text and the use of slow motion whilst standing up and then facing the audience should make a smooth transition into our spoken chorus work and be very creepy with should coincide with the school children theme and create a strong impact with the target audience and be very visually intriguing.

An idea I had during this line;

'That opens deadly flowers'

was for everyone to become the flower petals. I envisioned the cycle of a flower opening in spring and the movement of the petals in the wind. In order to achieve this we moved from our position at the end of the line;

'Cut through the tap rot of the vendetta'

which was James and I slicing our arm down the body of the girls. We speak the line and then turned our backs on eachother to create a circle of outwards facing 'petals'. We leaned over forwards and then majestically continued leaning forwards and backwards to physicalize the motion of opening of the flower. I think this section looks visually attractive and really physicalizes the key metaphor which should allow the audience to understand what the chorus is trying to portray clearer.

What We Modernised Through Physical Theatre

For the all boys scene we used Jacques Lecoq
technique where we choose an animal and physicalize it. Looking at the script, the theme of it is very dark and sinister and based around murder but the way it is written is as though the character; the chorus, is like an ant. A multitude of ants that are submissive and have leaders and who live in dirt but who work together to kill their prey using words to distract them until they 'surprise him'. With this, we decided that we should all physicalize insects. We did this by going from a zero emotion human state, walking around the room, and slowly becoming more and more insect like until we were at peak insect with our bodies hunched up and facial expressions really over emphasising a sort of hunger for the man were about to murder as it were. This shows how we have used a modern technique to contextualise our piece for contemporary use.

Link to information about Jacques Lecoq and his techniques - http://www.europamagna.org/pageshtml/Pgtheatre/SCOUT/StageIUFM/jlecoqeng.htm


What I Did Vocally In My Performance

For the opening scene, we all did a little exercise using the voice where we were tasked to carry out a series of characterisations such as;

• Happy Plastic
• Informative
• Spider/Insect

Happy plastic is an over exaggerated but fake way of talking in a really happy way. I said the line;

'But our own grief makes it easy'

This line is not very happy at all, its theme is of sadness because they have grief and are suffering therefore plastic happy which is this fake happy adds a sort of sarcastic tone to the line making it relatable to our audience.

The informative voice was used at;

'We come at the command of Clytemnestra'

and is used because I believe it makes the line as though the chorus is convincing in a salesman way. The chorus are informing the character on stage about who they are and why they are here and are trying to sell themselves to the character so they are trusted like a salesman trying to become trustworthy so the consumer will buy their product. The thing that makes it sinister here is the 'product' the chorus are selling is themselves and its because they are in great grief and pain. I believe that this will shock the audience and make the scene even more darker and tragedy like.

The spider/insect like way of talking was inspired, once again by Jacque Lecoq's technique of becoming animal like, but this time I used the voice and slowly went from being human and neutral to creepy and elongating my words to sound what I believed was spiderlike. I used this for the line;

'the rips in our skin are fresh'

I envisioned spiders ripping through their prey so using the voice I can add to the physicality to make this line sound very nasty and 'creaturesque' which should in turn have a large positive impact on the audience and as a chorus sound powerful.

Overall, with the voice side of this project and every other factor I have recorded in this blog, I have been successful in achieving the criteria of creating a contextualised contemporary performance from an ancient Greek play, The Oresteia using physical theatre.

The Oresiteia - The Chorus Speaks; Blog

Historical Context and Research

Link to National Theatre website - http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/video/an-introduction-to-greek-tragedy

Ancient Greek theatre was most popular during the years 550BC and 220BC. Greek tragedy was one of the three dramatic genres, the others being comedy and satyr, which were performed as a festival to honour the god Dionysus in Athens.  Euripides was one of the most influential playwrights of the time whose work was still being developed and performed years after their initial first premier. Play wrights such  as Euripides created a foundation of which all contemporary theatre is based upon. These plays would have been  performed by an all male, amateur cast. Also, the playwrights would only use 3 actors on stage at a time.

• The image on the left is a representation of a theatre that the plays would be performed at. The circular stage at the bottom is called the Orchestra where the chorus sung and danced.
• The central image is of a typical ancient Greek tragedy mask which is used to represent a character. Members of the chorus would where these masks.
• The image on the right is of a typical Greek chorus which would have been made up from around 12-15 chorus members, of all whom would be male. They can be seen wearing the character masks and robes to represent the playwrights envision.

This research helped me understand the context of Greek tragedy which should mean I can start to imagine the devising, physical theatre and voice opportunities there are as a chorus for our script.