Luke Engelen Performance Blog: Voice and The Actor

Vocal Development Programme

From my last blog entry, I have been focusing on my radio assignment. After practising the exercises I set from blog entry 1 I felt it would only be right to see what affect they had on certain vocal areas. The exercises I chose to do were all helpful to the radio play. For helping articulation I did an exercise which requires the actor to put his tongue to the hard palette and finger in between his upper teeth and lower teeth and then say a line of dialogue, this will make the vocal organs work harder as the tongue won't be able to move and neither will the jaw. The second exercise I did was to help with that I was saying my lines too fast, after further research I found that Sir Patrick Moore who I am playing spoke quite fast anyway, however I will still try to slow it down a bit as it may be difficult to understand. The exercise I used was talking to a beat, much like Iambic Pentameter. However as said before, I won't be using this technique in the final recording as I want to be able to change my pace and tone so it is more interesting and emotionally investing. The last exercise I did was to help with my thought for each line which in turn would help me understand the emotion behind the line and would ultimately change the way I would say it. It's a technique that is well established called actioning by English theatre director Max Stafford-Clark. The technique helps the actor find the emotion behind the thought which in turn can help slow down a naturally fast talking actor as they are looking for the thought as their character would.

A Metronome

After listening to this weeks audio recording, I felt I was still quite fast but not as bad as the recording before. I think the exercise that I used to speak to ore of a beat helped me a lot, as it helped me to take it slower, for this I used a metronome, a metronome is a device that delivers beats to a tempo, so if I wanted 10 beats per minute a beat would sound every 6 seconds. so I tried to speak to the beat, at points it was quite difficult as I wanted to say the whole line in a quick succession, I think the reason I was talking so quickly is that I wanted to get my point across considering Patrick Moore says so much, however I do understand that for my though I need to be concise and articulate and not too quick that these elements are affected. Another exercise that helped that I talked about was finding the thought, I did this partly in the radio recording and tried to find the next thought as the character would. There are points where this can become quite difficult as I'm reading off a script however I knew the script well enough where I knew mostly what line would be said next and so I would think that thought in my head before saying it to get a more genuine action from my character. I felt all of these exercises helped me to progress and I will use this in the future if I need to and I will work on my articulation exercises constantly as it is something I struggle with.