First Half of Midterm: Freeing the Natural Voice by Kristin Linklater

First Part of Midterm: Freeing the Natural Voice: Blurbs about what spoke out the most within the text

This book is intended for use by professional actors, student actors, teachers of acting, teachers of voice and speech, singers, singing teachers, and interested lay people. Its aims are to provide a series of exercises to free, develop, and strengthen the voice as a human instrument and to present a lucid view of the voice both in the general context of human communication and as a performer’s instrument.

The basic assumption of the work is that everyone possesses a voice capable of expressing, through a two-to-four-octave natural pitch range, whatever gamut of emotion, complexity of mood, and subtlety of thought he or she experiences.

The result of the work will be a voice that is in direct contact with emotional impulses, shaped by the intellect but not inhibited by it….The natural voice is transparent, it reveals, not describes, inner impulses of emotion and thought, directly and spontaneously. The person is heard, not the person’s voice.

The paradox is that actors must train their voices so that they can sacrifice them. Actors’ voices must learn to be dissolved by the impulses of thought and feeling….their voices must be wide and long and strong and tender enough to reveal the length and breadth of the imagination.
From Workday Three The Touch of Sound: Initial Vibrations…pool of water

Picture: A deep, calm forest pool with a surface roughly level with your diaphragm and its depths in your pelvic region…

Gravity loves to feed off your excess tensions. When you lie on the floor, gravity will happily suck tension out of you. When you stand up , gravity will happily play games with you to se how you can compete with his pull. Gravity is constantly challenging us in the game of life…

Picture that a great reservoir of the vibrations of sound preexists in the pelvic basin…
From Workday Five Jaw Awareness…prison gate or open door

One of the strongest and most universal muscular defense systems is in the jaw hinges.
From Workday Seven Freeing the Channel: The soft palate…

…the soft palate is all flesh and muscle. For working purposes you can regard it as either the doorway from the throat to the mouth or as the trapdoor leading up into the middle and upper resonators.

Do you yawn vertically or horizontally?

Communication is the by-product of desire and freedom.
From Workday Ten Developing and Strengthening: Chest, Mouth, Teeth resonators

    Each part of the voice has its own rung on the resonating ladder, and the ladder is the body from the chest to the mouth, teeth, sinuses, nose and skull. You will be directing your voice to move up and down the resonating ladder until every part of it is available, familiar and safe. Weak rungs can be strengthened and gaps in the ladder can be filled in ways that are palpable. Your vocal range of three to four octaves can be mapped clearly and your use of it can become physically familiar through regular travel.
From Workdays Twelve and Thirteen Breathing Power

As we continue the exploration of breathing capacity the challenge is again to ask your Self: “What is my capacity for imagination, for emotion, for desire? What could I say through these large spaces I find within myself?” Let your developing breathing capacity suggest the development of your creative capacity.

Once you have found enough freedom in the solar plexus/diaphragm area to induce fast, even panting on breath alone and with sound, you can practice the panting on double triads….

The essential attributes of the actor’s voice are range, variety, beauty, clarity, power and volume, but sensitivity is the quality that will validate all the others, for they are dull attributes unless they are reflecting inner energy…Energies that fuel the voice muscles need to be attuned with great sensitivity to the still finer energies of psychological creation if the communication from inside to outside is going to be transparently true. When the energy of the content is powerful, the economy of its transmission will preserve the truth of the content.
Words…imagery

Language began instinctually, physically, primitively.

Awareness of the sensory nature of words must come before that of their informational purpose…
About Texts…art

The etymological root of the word text is the Latin texere, which means “to weave” or “to fabricate”. A text is a tapestry of ideas woven with words.

    A word or a phrase or a sentence is like a pebble that, when thrown into the pool of the body-mind, sets up ripples that disturb the waters. The waters? Physical, sensory, sensual and emotional energies.When you are first learning lines, do not use the word memorize. …The old-fashioned term “learn by heart” tells you what you need to be doing when you learn. You need to be breathing the words in so that the underlying thoughts become feelings and the cellular make-up of your body starts to rearrange itself in response.

    Listening in to classical texts we can hear how free and wide-ranging the classical voice was…Well-nourished by a diet of songs, poems and stories still rooted in a thousand-year-old oral tradition, all classes of society exercised the full range of voice for practical purposes. In the fields and cottages, women and men called, cajoled, wailed and wassailed. In the streets of the cities, they hawked their wares at full volume. In schools and universities, men and boys recited their lessons in stately Latin according to the rules of rhetoric. Ship captains threw their voices up with the wind into the sails where ship-boys tugged at ropes; armies were lashed into battle by the tongues of their leaders; kings and queens, noblemen and women harangued their subjects with a forceful eloquence that made good use of the melodious range of their voices exercised daily by singing motets and madrigals and canons and cantonets.

Tuning into the Text…imagination

    You must be able to experience emotional imagination in your body. You must be able to express the incarnated emotional imagination in words if you are to speak classical texts and poetic texts truthfully.