Pedagogical Rationale & Philosophy
(UNDER CONSTRUCTION)
The human voice is as unique and particular to our self as our hand print, and like our hand print carries the traces of our history, environment and experience. It is also not an isolated part of us and as such our voices and our bodies are intimately and inseparably connected. Too often actors and performers view both thoughts and emotions through the intellectual lens and allow the idea of those things to guide expression and, consciously or not, plan and craft every aspect of a performance before even stepping onto the stage. When we are present and connected to our selves, both our mental and emotional life arise from our physical experiences and sensations. Our vocal expression is a culmination of how the components of our selves flow freely, or do not.
I believe the body is more powerful than the mind in shaping our thoughts, feelings and actions. As the voice is inseparable from our bodies, it is only through embodied training and connection to sound and speech that we can realise our truest, most expressive voice. The voice of a performer therefore must be embodied and as free as possible in the moment from mental interference, be it anticipation of a future moment, or expectations based on what worked or didn’t work in the past.
I view my role as voice teacher as being not only the fostering of curiosity about ourselves and our experience moment to moment, but to provide tools which continually develop a student’s awareness of the voice in its present state – not what we might wish it to be, or what we think and feel it might be, but a non-judgmental awareness; a conscious curiosity. When the student can hold themselves accountable to this as a target (rather than an ideal), it helps the teacher to guide a student through their development and achievement of personal goals through particular points of reference on that journey. It also helps the student to develop their own inner teacher outside of the class environment. We all have our own inner critic - we can never fully be rid of them. But as Declan Donnellan says, that inner critic probably isn’t right, probably never was, and at best is sorely out of date. As a voice teacher I aim to help students to quieten their inner critic and awaken and exalt their inner teacher.
In this way I see the voice teacher’s role as being to facilitate the student’s own learning of them 'selves.' I accomplish this through experiences based in current understanding of how the voice works, the connection between our minds, our bodies and our voice, all supported by a sound pedagogical progression.
It is my goal for students of voice to be able to function as autonomous professionals in their careers and to acquire life-long learning skills through inspiring curiosity about themselves and their own voices in both their professional and everyday lives.
Students learn through action, through doing, and it is my current focus to continue to develop practices and experiences whereby the student has the space to do first, then reflect.
My teaching is grounded in the principle of functional training – that is, training which is geared towards the specific tasks of speech, and in my particular area of interest, for performance. Performers need to be safely heard and safely understood, such that the use of the voice within that task is...
Safe, Efficient, Effective, and Skilful
Performers need to be able to SAFELY carry and sustain the vocal load required by their role, be it a large or small role, a 1000 or 50 seat venue, indoors or outdoors, microphone-enhanced, or on camera – for an hour, one week or 6 months.
When SAFETY is successfully married with the need to heard in any space and context sustainably and without strain, one has an EFFICIENT voice.
When an EFFICIENT voice is successfully married with the audience’s need to understand and connect to what the actor is communicating, one has an EFFECTIVE voice.
An EFFECTIVE voice which enables the actor to expressively and compellingly communicate not just intellectual but emotional, sensory, imagistic and visceral information to an audience is SKILLFUL.
Therefore, voice training must be ultimately focused on creating a skilful voice in the speaker or performer, for their intended audience. But in order to achieve that objective, a student of voice must become aware of habitual patterns in their body and voice which inhibit this, and seek to break or redirect them safely and efficiently into effectiveness and skill. This is another role of the voice teacher: to bring to conscious awareness the habits of body, breath, phonation, resonance, articulation and speech which make each student’s voice unique in its realisation and its potential.
As a Certified Teacher of Miller Voice Method (mVm), I draw heavily from this philosophy, which prioritises the same goal of a compelling voice which communicates truthfully, even though everything about the task of acting conspires to make truthfulness artificial, or an elusive target. mVm is concerned with how we can safely and skilfully be in control of what the audience is experiencing and, as such, centres the audience’s experience in the training of actors instead of the actor’s capacity to form mental images and explore their inner world. These things are not dismissed, but in many ways are seen as a given - as actors, we know how to pretend and make believe, but performance requires that we make others believe with us.
Declan Donnellan says that “what we say is about who we are talking to. What we say is a tool to change our hearers.” mVm achieves this through embodied learning experiences which develop an instinctual awareness of the interaction of the breath in the body and the voice, and what it is that disconnects us, and the listener, from that same truth.
As my philosophy aligns closely with mVm's in regards to presence and functional training, I work with mVm's Active Breath to foster moment to moment experience and to break those patterns of memorisation and expression which so frequently lead to poor vocal use and a lack of compelling storytelling.
I first encountered mVm in 2017 when I worked with John Patrick at UNC Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Playmakers Repertory Company, and subsequently with Scott Miller at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. In addition to my in depth pedagogical training with Katerina Moraitis at NIDA, I was mentored throughout my MFA by John Patrick to assist me in integrating my learning of mVm with NIDA's teaching philosophy which was rigorous in it's approach to pedagogy, student-centred learning and critical reflection. This relationship with mVm Studio and other teachers of the Method is ongoing as I aim to further develop this aspect of my teaching and solidify the connections of my own philosophy with mVm which have been developing since that first contact.
As personal awareness and self-teaching forms a principle part of my philosophy I also draw upon Lessac’s principle of organic instruction as it is key to “identifying sensations, acquiring perception, responding to awareness” and ultimately a safer, more efficient foundation for the voice in it's true natural state.
My teaching of accent and dialect is greatly influenced by my study of Cognitive Linguistics and in particular Cognitive Phonology. From this perspective we learn what something is by virtue of understanding what it is not, in other words by direct contrast. This applies not only to accent and dialect and the sounds of speech but to the release of habitual tension, effective breath and support, safe and free phonation, balanced resonance and clear and compelling speech. I am passionate about engaging in research into the links between the Linguistic study of how we learn and perceive sounds and speech as human beings, and how we as voice teachers guide our students to learn safe, efficient and effective speech that an audience hears, understands, and is interested in. Knight-Thompson Speechwork is one of the only current practices with this same interest and as such my approach to the sounds of speech aligns closely with their approach of “speaking with skill.” In terms of teaching dialect, my approach also aligns with the idea that the more you learn to feel and/or hear, the more things you learn to feel and/or hear.
Textual analysis and investigation, which I call mining the text, has been influenced by everyone from my parents - a literary agent and a teacher librarian - to former NIDA teachers such as Tony Knight (Laban), Kevin Jackson (Chekhov and contemporary text), Aarne Neeme (Shakespeare), Linklater (via Jill Brown) and Frankie Armstrong (who never lets the mind take over the body in her work).
In summary, my goal for students of voice is for them to learn to know themselves. By this I mean to know not only the anatomy and structure of their vocal mechanism and how it operates to create voice, but for them to break down the barriers between their conscious artistic expression, and their unconscious habits so that they can become aware of the full range of expression available to them.
In this regard I believe that acting is voice and voice is acting. The actor’s voice is the culmination of their art, and the coalescence and expression of rehearsal, preparation and most importantly training. A compelling and captivating performance arises from present information, informed by but not dependent on preparation or expectation, being the fuel for the creative fire.
I believe the body is more powerful than the mind in shaping our thoughts, feelings and actions. As the voice is inseparable from our bodies, it is only through embodied training and connection to sound and speech that we can realise our truest, most expressive voice. The voice of a performer therefore must be embodied and as free as possible in the moment from mental interference, be it anticipation of a future moment, or expectations based on what worked or didn’t work in the past.
I view my role as voice teacher as being not only the fostering of curiosity about ourselves and our experience moment to moment, but to provide tools which continually develop a student’s awareness of the voice in its present state – not what we might wish it to be, or what we think and feel it might be, but a non-judgmental awareness; a conscious curiosity. When the student can hold themselves accountable to this as a target (rather than an ideal), it helps the teacher to guide a student through their development and achievement of personal goals through particular points of reference on that journey. It also helps the student to develop their own inner teacher outside of the class environment. We all have our own inner critic - we can never fully be rid of them. But as Declan Donnellan says, that inner critic probably isn’t right, probably never was, and at best is sorely out of date. As a voice teacher I aim to help students to quieten their inner critic and awaken and exalt their inner teacher.
In this way I see the voice teacher’s role as being to facilitate the student’s own learning of them 'selves.' I accomplish this through experiences based in current understanding of how the voice works, the connection between our minds, our bodies and our voice, all supported by a sound pedagogical progression.
It is my goal for students of voice to be able to function as autonomous professionals in their careers and to acquire life-long learning skills through inspiring curiosity about themselves and their own voices in both their professional and everyday lives.
Students learn through action, through doing, and it is my current focus to continue to develop practices and experiences whereby the student has the space to do first, then reflect.
My teaching is grounded in the principle of functional training – that is, training which is geared towards the specific tasks of speech, and in my particular area of interest, for performance. Performers need to be safely heard and safely understood, such that the use of the voice within that task is...
Safe, Efficient, Effective, and Skilful
Performers need to be able to SAFELY carry and sustain the vocal load required by their role, be it a large or small role, a 1000 or 50 seat venue, indoors or outdoors, microphone-enhanced, or on camera – for an hour, one week or 6 months.
When SAFETY is successfully married with the need to heard in any space and context sustainably and without strain, one has an EFFICIENT voice.
When an EFFICIENT voice is successfully married with the audience’s need to understand and connect to what the actor is communicating, one has an EFFECTIVE voice.
An EFFECTIVE voice which enables the actor to expressively and compellingly communicate not just intellectual but emotional, sensory, imagistic and visceral information to an audience is SKILLFUL.
Therefore, voice training must be ultimately focused on creating a skilful voice in the speaker or performer, for their intended audience. But in order to achieve that objective, a student of voice must become aware of habitual patterns in their body and voice which inhibit this, and seek to break or redirect them safely and efficiently into effectiveness and skill. This is another role of the voice teacher: to bring to conscious awareness the habits of body, breath, phonation, resonance, articulation and speech which make each student’s voice unique in its realisation and its potential.
As a Certified Teacher of Miller Voice Method (mVm), I draw heavily from this philosophy, which prioritises the same goal of a compelling voice which communicates truthfully, even though everything about the task of acting conspires to make truthfulness artificial, or an elusive target. mVm is concerned with how we can safely and skilfully be in control of what the audience is experiencing and, as such, centres the audience’s experience in the training of actors instead of the actor’s capacity to form mental images and explore their inner world. These things are not dismissed, but in many ways are seen as a given - as actors, we know how to pretend and make believe, but performance requires that we make others believe with us.
Declan Donnellan says that “what we say is about who we are talking to. What we say is a tool to change our hearers.” mVm achieves this through embodied learning experiences which develop an instinctual awareness of the interaction of the breath in the body and the voice, and what it is that disconnects us, and the listener, from that same truth.
As my philosophy aligns closely with mVm's in regards to presence and functional training, I work with mVm's Active Breath to foster moment to moment experience and to break those patterns of memorisation and expression which so frequently lead to poor vocal use and a lack of compelling storytelling.
I first encountered mVm in 2017 when I worked with John Patrick at UNC Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Playmakers Repertory Company, and subsequently with Scott Miller at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. In addition to my in depth pedagogical training with Katerina Moraitis at NIDA, I was mentored throughout my MFA by John Patrick to assist me in integrating my learning of mVm with NIDA's teaching philosophy which was rigorous in it's approach to pedagogy, student-centred learning and critical reflection. This relationship with mVm Studio and other teachers of the Method is ongoing as I aim to further develop this aspect of my teaching and solidify the connections of my own philosophy with mVm which have been developing since that first contact.
As personal awareness and self-teaching forms a principle part of my philosophy I also draw upon Lessac’s principle of organic instruction as it is key to “identifying sensations, acquiring perception, responding to awareness” and ultimately a safer, more efficient foundation for the voice in it's true natural state.
My teaching of accent and dialect is greatly influenced by my study of Cognitive Linguistics and in particular Cognitive Phonology. From this perspective we learn what something is by virtue of understanding what it is not, in other words by direct contrast. This applies not only to accent and dialect and the sounds of speech but to the release of habitual tension, effective breath and support, safe and free phonation, balanced resonance and clear and compelling speech. I am passionate about engaging in research into the links between the Linguistic study of how we learn and perceive sounds and speech as human beings, and how we as voice teachers guide our students to learn safe, efficient and effective speech that an audience hears, understands, and is interested in. Knight-Thompson Speechwork is one of the only current practices with this same interest and as such my approach to the sounds of speech aligns closely with their approach of “speaking with skill.” In terms of teaching dialect, my approach also aligns with the idea that the more you learn to feel and/or hear, the more things you learn to feel and/or hear.
Textual analysis and investigation, which I call mining the text, has been influenced by everyone from my parents - a literary agent and a teacher librarian - to former NIDA teachers such as Tony Knight (Laban), Kevin Jackson (Chekhov and contemporary text), Aarne Neeme (Shakespeare), Linklater (via Jill Brown) and Frankie Armstrong (who never lets the mind take over the body in her work).
In summary, my goal for students of voice is for them to learn to know themselves. By this I mean to know not only the anatomy and structure of their vocal mechanism and how it operates to create voice, but for them to break down the barriers between their conscious artistic expression, and their unconscious habits so that they can become aware of the full range of expression available to them.
In this regard I believe that acting is voice and voice is acting. The actor’s voice is the culmination of their art, and the coalescence and expression of rehearsal, preparation and most importantly training. A compelling and captivating performance arises from present information, informed by but not dependent on preparation or expectation, being the fuel for the creative fire.
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