2nd Part of Mid Term: Freeing the Natural Voice (Part 3 Remaining)

Part 3:
The Link to Text and Acting
Words...imagery

Steps:
Step 1: exploring the different effects that different vowel sounds can have on your feelings and on your body. The feeling of vowels and consonants reveals sub-verbal meaning in words. The feleing links us to the desire we want to communicate. The word feeling implies both physical sensation and emotional effect.
exs: "AAH-AAH-AAH" & EEEEEEEEEEEEE or OOOOOOOOOOOO

Step 2: Take three vowel sounds whose quality is intrinsically sharper, shorter, and more staccato than the first three.
exs: a (as in cat) i (as in hit) and u (as in cut)

Step 3: Drop contrasting vowel sounds into your body

Step 4: The feeling of consonants
exs: MMMMMMMMM & VVVVVVVVV or ZZZZZZZZ

Step 5: Two contrasting vowels and consonants
exs: OOOZZZZtAA & ZZAAOOOt or tAAZZOOO

Step 6: Organize the intrinsic music of vowels with the resonating ladder.
She then talks you through exercises so that you can feel the place in your body as to where these sounds come from.
exs: ZZOO travel down your pelvis & WO-O-E  move in the middle of your body or SHAWWWAA feel attached to your rib cage

Basically Linklater is trying to get her reader more consciously aware of the feeling of vowels and consonants, and the emotions that derive from the usage of those sounds.

Step 7: using steps 1-6 as models for anatomizing words. Choose a word that is onomatopoeic and play it into your body, ignoring its sense as much as possible.
exs: Splash ratatat murmuring susurration whip

Step 8: Take a word with a representational picture
exs: wind butterfly clouds sky

Step 9: Take a word with an emotional image
exs: love rage giggle sorrow

Step 10: Find words with more abstract images
exs: purple red blue yellow jagged round

Step 11: Explore action words
exs: Run subside explore live die fight go fly

Step 12: Play with small words
exs: for and to it if such

Step 13: String together a sequence of the words you used in steps 8 through 11 in any order without making sense
exs: butterflies blue giggle murmuring


The point of the exercise is to allow individual words to influence your voice, giving a phrase or sentence more life than just what it gets from the overall sense.
Memories of kindergarden poetry speaking- "The sun is in the sky," pointing heavenward, voice with an upward inflection, "And the earth is down below," looking down, dropping the voice- may give one pause. But these exercises are designed to start moving the voice from within, to make itcome alive to a sensory and imagistic inner world.

Tuning into the text...imagination
(This is a brief overview, a check list for the reader to go over what they have lerned throughout studying their natural voice within this book)

Checklist:
Transitions: Thought transitions, transitions in the subject matter, transitions in the argument, transitions in the activity
The Six Eternal Questions: Who, Where, When, What, Why, How
The Five P's: Personal, Psychological, Professional, Political, Philosophical
Dynamics: Dynamics of Text, dynamics of the character, dynamics of the event
Rhythm: Rhythm of speech, rhythm of character, rhythm of the scene

Overall the message that Linklater coveys within her book is this: The human voice is remarkable, complex, and delicate. It is capable of not only conveying sophisticated intellectual concepts but also subtle emotional nuances. Although the uniqueness and beauty of the human voice have been appreciated for centuries, medical science has begun to understand the workings and care of the voice only since the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is important to understand the basic functions and structures of the voice.

Kristin Linklater attempts to explain to the reader, or actor, how their voice physically works within her book, as well as how to use it in a healthy way, and the right way. Linklater's book is revolutionary for the voice of the actor and has helped me to shape and mold my voice as a performer.