Kristin Linklater - Freeing the Natural Voice: Imagery and Art in the Practice of Voice and Language

PART ONE: THE TOUCH OF SOUND
The First Four Weeks of Work

1: Workday One
Physical Awareness: The spine
The support of natural breathing... a tree

2: Workday Two
Breathing Awareness: Freeing the breath, the source of sound... the air

3: Workday Three
The Touch of Sound: Initial vibrations... pool of water

4: Workday Four
Freeing Vibrations: Lips, head, body... rivers of sound

Intermission Warm-Up
The Second Four Weeks of Work

5: Workday Five
Freeing the Channel: Jaw awareness and relaxation
Getting rid of tension... prison gate or open door

6: Workday Six
Freeing the Channel: Tongue awareness
Stretching, loosening, releasing... story-teller

7: Workday Seven
Freeing the Channel: The soft palate
Opening and limbering... space

8: Workday Eight
The Spine and the Channel: Connection... source, journey, destination

9: Workday Nine
Throat Awareness: The open throat... chasm

PART TWO: THE RESONATING LADDER
The Next Six to Eight Weeks of Work

10: Workday Ten
Developing and Strengthening: Chest, mouth, teeth resonators
Finding resonance... purple, blue, yellow

11: Workday Eleven
Releasing the Voice from the Body: Calling, triads... the rainbow

12 / 13: Workdays Twelve and Thirteen
Breathing Power: Diaphragm, intercostals, pelvic floor... breathing gym
Sensitivity and Power: Enlivening and strengthening impulses... free weights

14: Workday Fourteen
Sinus Resonators: Middle of the face, middle range... the road out

15: Workday Fifteen
Nasal Resonators: Carrying power... mountain peak

16: Workday Sixteen
Range: Three to four octaves... from basement to attic

17: Workday Seventeen
Skull Resonator: High intensity... playing the dome

18: Workday Eighteen
Exercising Your Range: Strength, flexibility, freedom... swinging

19: Workdays Nineteen, Twenty, Twenty-one, and Thereafter
Articulating the voice into Words: Consonants and vowelsvoice joints

I was lucky to come to the United States when I did. I came in response to the urgent encouragement of many American actors who came to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) for a year of training during the years I taught there. They were usually on a graduate level or had been working professionally and came for further training. They told me that the kind of voice work that Iris Warren and I were teaching was unknown in the States at that time and could be immensely valuable to American actor training. When I arrived in New York in 1963 it seemed that I was bringing a method of work at exactly the right time to exactly the right place.

The search for an equilibrium between technique and emotional freedom occupied actor training from the 1920s on. Indeed, the search continues to this day; but in the history of actor development, both American and British, the search was consistently out of step throughout the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Stanislavskys books, the Group Theatre, and Lee Strasbergs Actors Studio moved American actors forward in psychological and emotional exploration to the point that they virtually abandoned the study of external skills. In Britain those skills reigned supreme. By the 1950s the influence of an emotionally vital American theatre had begun to inspire the British to fill out their technique with more gut content. By the 1960s, America, mushrooming with regional repertory companies, found its actors and directors crying out for technique to cope with a wide range of theatrical productions from classical to avant-garde.

When American actors tried to find teachers to help them meet their demands, they often found that technical skills were still being taught as they had been in the twenties through elocution, ballet, singing, gymnastics, and phonetics, making the gap between creation and communication unbridgeable. There was the creative, imaginative inner life and the skillful outer communicative one, with no connective tissue.

Meanwhile in London, methodsoriginated by Jacques Copeau, developed by Michel St. Denis and Litz Pisk, and nurtured at the Old Vic Theatre Schoolof developing the actors being into a sensitive, integrated, creative instrument had grown. The spirit of the Old Vic Theatre was carried into LAMDA when Michael MacOwan took it over in 1954, beginning his collaboration in actor training with Iris Warren.

When I moved to America in 1963 to set up my own voice studio, I found that the voice work I brought with me had evolved over the years to the point at which it would marry well with American methods of acting. There was still an imbalance between the creative use of inner self and communicative skill in both America and Britain: British theatre was still suffering from a lack of emotional and psychological demands, while American theatre training placed little value on physical and vocal skills, but all this was changing. The language I had inherited from Iris Warren was easily translated into the emotional and psychological terminology of, for instance, the Method and other acting methodologies that had branched off from those of the Group Theatre.

I had much to learn, and the balance in my own work was immeasurably enhanced by my involvement, between 1964 and 1978, as vocal coach with various American acting companies, such as the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre under Sir Tyrone Guthrie, the Lincoln Center Repertory Company under Robert Whitehead, Harold Clurman, and Elia Kazan, and the Open Theater under Joseph Chaikin. Another strong influence on my development as a teacher was the acting teacher Peter Kass, with whom I worked in the New York University Graduate Theatre Program (now The Tisch School of the Arts) throughout that same period.

It was in America that I was introduced to the Alexander Technique (Judith Leibowitz was my teacher) that helped clarify the psychophysical nature of the voice work, and I benefited enormously during the sixties, seventies, and eighties from the growing psycho-therapeutic and general interest in the interdependence of the mind and body; more and more people were discovering that to unlock the mind, it was necessary to unlock the body and vice versa. The Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais work, Rolfing, Tai Chi, Yoga, and now Body Mind Centering are all popular and effective physical disciplines that help to free the emotional and psychological self by ridding the body of habitual tensions. The turn of the twentieth to the twenty-first century found the world of neuroscience providing new insights into the workings of the mind, the emotions, the body, and consciousness. Books such as Descartes Error and The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio offer scientific back up for the theories of those of us in the performance-training field who teach the wisdom of the body and the fundamental intelligence of the emotions.