Voice and Character – some reflections for actors
First delivered as a webinar on “Characterisation & Acting” – for Theatre Alive 17th May 2021.
I run a theatre company called Actors Ensemble India Forum (AEIF). We have a multidisciplinary approach to training at AEIF. We freely mix all the things we love doing – it could be martial form or climbing. We try to keep a studio mindset where the new writing comes from experimentation and rigorous research. We like creating a healthy space for collaboration by bringing together the writer/performer/designer/director to shape the work.
There is never a sense of a finished product but a sense of continuous learning and work in progress.
I am an Associate Fitzmaurice Voicework® (FV) Teacher and the South Asia Regional Coordinator at Fitzmaurice Institute. FV is a holistic approach to voice which brings together practices like yoga, meditation, healing and energy work to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the voice in the service of meaningful communication. I am one of two FV trained teachers in India at the moment, and the only one teach in the region. I am hoping this will change very soon. We are a very small community of voice teachers across the world of about 260 teachers.
I founded Vachika in 2010 because I wanted to share what I had learned about the human voice from extreme misuse and having damaged it several times during my years training as an actor. I have arrived at a practice by blending pedagogies and practices for vocal health for actor training.
I’m going to address the question on character from voicework. Conventional entries into character building are most often either psychological or behavioural – The hope with which I offer my thoughts is to nudge the thinking towards voice as an alternative entry point into character, behaviour and psychology. I have to offer 5 ideas about voice that will help rethink the role of voice for the performer.
1. Breath – Integrating voice with body, breath, imagination – impulse – The practice of releasing muscular tightness around breathing process helps free it up for breath and voice. Voice is simply sounding breath. The initial part of the work is to bring it back to the primal process of sound making, to an intuitive creative self.
How does the human voice work? What is preverbal? What comes before language?
A fascinating fact – the evolution of the human voice sits between an autonomic response and the central nervous system action. An intention to speak, to be heard and to draw a response from the listener.
2. The spoken word and the written word – How meaning is remade every time the word is spoken out aloud – Moving into intentional speaking we encounter the word. Which is a specific arrangement of sound. We are used to a kind of ‘hearing’ how the word is spoken. But when you move to ‘listening’ sensorially from within the body it alters the experience of the speaker who utters the words. And this is rich for investigation and exploration. Example from a written piece of text:
Lenard Cohen – poet, and musician. He has read this out as a piece of text and has performed it as a singer and musician
Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night beside her
And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer that you’ve always been her lover
One small exercise. First read silently. Then say the words. For sound. Bear in mind that every language has its own exquisite set of rules and musicality. Writers with any depth of understanding will have worked on embedding specific arrangements of sound for this deeper experience of their text.
3. Musicality – I want to Unpack the idea of musicality, by placing 3 ideas before you.
1. As an instrument, is it possible to change the quality of the sound by simply bending it, twisting it, creating tightness or opening out the body? Example:
“”You go on ahead. I’ll come slowly.””
“”Isn’t this place so beautiful?””
“”Shall we stop and take some photos?””
So high.
Free.
Up in the mountains it’s so quiet you can hear the long low hum of silence.
Mass of grey eternity snow without end.
Freedom at last.
If I could hear the deep rumble of the glacier.
If I could feel the hum of the planet spin.
The curve of the sky a dome home in heaven.
2. If one assumes that speech is at the end of the day vibrations – a mantra so to speak; is it possible to invoke a subtle response in the body of the speaker and the listener by enhancing vibrations of a word? Example:
keep the room clean
keep her dream clean
scream the ring clean
dream ring scream clean
3. To give a theoretical and historical context, visual artists and performance arts practitioners reference the body as a canvas or material. I have experimented with the body as musical instrument, for speech and song are not too far apart. Melody, rhythm and cadence are very much part of speaking and our aural expression.
4. The field of Voice – The uniqueness of the human voice. This brings me to another fact about the human voice. No one ever in the history of time before or after has or will have the exact same voice as yours. The voice is our aural personality and is shaped by every aspect of our lived experience, our histories, politics, culture and geography. It really is who we are. It is not a coincidence that the uniqueness of our individuality as artists, whatever may be of mode of expression – as writers, painters, poets – our specificity is referred to as ‘the artist’s voice’.
5. Characterisation – While I have not spoken about how these are instrumental in the making of character directly, I have tried to offer insights into voicework to help you think about characterisation with voice as the central driver for performance making.
I want to end with a quote from James Wesley Enoch’s keynote address at the Voice And Speech Trainers Association conference held in Singapore in August of 2017.
“I am only half serious but I think there is something to be said for the power of a series of vocal vibrations and resonances to shape the future. The words you choose, the intent of their use, the inherent promise in the utterance of the voice can give shape to a life. Yours and others. Why not? The vibrations of tectonic plates can create tsunamis and earthquakes, unleash huge amounts of energy and change the face of the world. Why not in our own little way, believe that our voices can affect our world.”