AYLI Diary: Shakespeare Boot Camp 2
/After warming up (and catching up our castmates who weren’t with us last night), we looked at two vocal expression tools for our toolkits: Lessac Method and the Vocal Sequence. Both are very mechanical ways for you to explore the possibilities of your own voice and apply your discoveries to the text, which is always important, of course, but even moreso when doing Shakespeare.
Lessac
Arthur Lessac invented a method of vocal production that taught people to make the sounds of English in a very mechanical way, to produce more resonance and more precision in the voice. It can be used to train an actor away from a regional accent (or into one), to correct speech issues, and — for our purposes — to instill a sensitivity to the sounds of the text.
We began with the basic vowels:
oo — woo
oh — whoa
aw — wa(r)
ow — wow
ah (ee) — why
ay — way
(Remind me, cast, to backtrack and include yee-ay)
This is exactly how confusing and vague all this is at the moment—but also exactly how useful it is once we fill in all the blanks (metaphorically).
Then came the dreaded consonant sheets, five pages of words with Lessac’s “orchestral” designations: the N Violin, the M viola, the Z double bass, etc. We tackled the first page: N, M, V, F, Z, S, trying to resonate and extend these consonants: innnnnnntonnnnnne, etc.
After practicing all the words on the first page, everyone selected a line from the show and worked on that, extending and buzzing the vowels and that first set of consonants wherever they occurred in the line. Again, the idea is not that we’re going to go onstage and say the lines in such an weirdly affected manner, but that by deliberately and intensively exploring these sounds we can 1) extend our own vocal capabilities; and 2) make discoveries about the sounds of the text that might be useful in interpreting our character and delivering that to the audience.
FOR EXAMPLE: Mariel chose Rosalind’s line:
I would cure you, if you would but call me Rosalind
and come every day to my cote and woo me.
As she extended all those vowels, what we found was that the second line ended with this lovely “and wooooo meeeee,” which in the scene itself would be a great laugh line: “comeeverydaytomycote and woooo meee.” So while she will never stand on stage and say, “IIIIIIIII wooooooooood cyooooooooor yooooooo…,” she may very well end up keeping the “woooo meee” in some modified form.
Vocal Sequence
Back in the 60s and 70s, theatre practitioner Herbert Blau and his theatre cohort (Kraken) developed an exercise called the Vocal Sequence. It is simply a set of challenges to the actor to express a selected text through a series of filters, emotional and physical, the purpose of which is to allow the actor to explore and discover emotional content in the text.
Sounds complicated, and it is. But as the Cartoon of the Day reminds us, don’t stop and look down.
Don’t stop. Don’t look down.
The Vocal Sequence:
Speak silently.
Speak normally.
Slow motion.
Introjecting.
Project atmosphere.
Speak from imaginary center.
Diminish and expand.
Line by line ideographs.
Faster and faster.
Densities.
Expand space, contract space.
Duration.
Varying pitch.
Perform actions with voice.
Change character of voice.
Experiment with vowels and consonants, syllable weighting.
Unusual or grotesque or mimetic sounds.
Mouth sounds.
Laughing/crying.
Wailing/keening.
If you need more explanation, follow the link above—or come to a rehearsal and play with us as we go daft with weirdness.
We explored the first three (the starting lineup in any Vocal Sequence). I played with/demonstrated the rest of the list, to the amusement and fear of the cast. I think they saw the possibilities. (Comments and questions welcome in comments.)
NEXT: Tackling the verse
