WEEK 1

Workshop activities:

• Breathing exercise
• Voiced/unvoiced letters
• Boo, boh, baw, baa, bay, bee
• Understanding blank verse
• 'When your lying awake' pronunciation practice

Monologue to learn for next workshop: 'O pardon me thou bleeding piece of earth' from Julius Caesar.

The breathing exercise was designed to teach us to breath from our diaphragm. This enables you to take in more air by pushing the air down and expanding the stomach area as opposed to filling your chest were the volume of air is restricted by the ribcage. It also disiplines your breathing during speach allowing you to keep talking for longer by taking in one initial deep breath and simply topping it up by taking tiny unnoticeable breathes. I found this exercise challenging and difficult as I'm not used to breathing in this way this is deffinately one I'm going to have to practice.

As a group we did an exercise where we had to work out the unvoiced letters (the ones that you form with your lips and tounge) and voiced letters of the alphabet (those that use the same mouthed form as the unvoiced but change when you make sound from your throat). For example:

Voiced=B D V Z G

Unvoiced=P T F S K

We also learnt an exercise that helps us form the vowel sounds and project our voices effectinely. The exercise involved saying Boo, Boh, Baw, Baa, Bay, Bee whilst with every vowel sound opening your mouth as wide as possible. This combined with the breathing technique makes you push the sound from your chest instead of from your throat where you can damage your vocal cords. I found this tricky because I naturally have quite a soft voice but I think it will just need some practice.

Ian explained blank verse to us using 'O pardon me thou bleeding piece of earth' from Shakespeares Julius Caesar as an example. We were taught that it was usually noble characters in plays that spoke in blank verse. Ian explained that iambic pentametre follows a rythem ten syllables or five feet per line (although this rule is sometimes broken by Shakespeare). Each foot is two syllables one stressed and one unstressed. We were also told about four variations. Troche means one strong syllable, then one weak. Spondee means two strong. Aniapaest means two weak, then one strong and Dactyl means one strong followed by two weak.

The final activity we performed in this lesson was a read through, as a group, of the first verse of 'When your lying awake' whilst concentrating on pronouncing every syllable. This vocal exercise was particularly valuable to me as it made me aware of how lazy my speach can be when I'm not concentrating. I especially need to work on the 'th' sound being careful not to replace it with 'f' (think instead of fink ect to many years of watching eastenders!). It was interesting to hear just how much clearer the speach sounded when we made a conscious effort to pronounce words properly.