FINDING YOUR INNER VOICE WORKSHOP

Introduction
Hi – I’m Monique Spanbrook and I’m going to be taking you on a journey to find your inner voice.  Now we’ve only got fifteen minutes and since finding the inner voice usually takes people no less than a year of intensive workshopping, forgive me if I rush a little.  Thankfully I’ve had a little experience in this area so hopefully I can teach you a few quick exercises so that you at least walk away from having some idea of what I’m talking about.

A brief history about me.  I am an actor and a singer who has been performing since I was about 5 years old.  I have studied at WAAPA – the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts of Hugh Jackman and Francis O’Connor-fame for those of you who are not familiar with the lingo.  And in over 6 years of voice training I have studied the Alexander and Feldenkrais techniques for breathing and posture, the Cicily Berry, Kristin Linklater and Jo Estil methods for voice production and just to be really sure what was going on with my voicebox I’ve even had a camera sent through my nose and into my throat to observe my voice box in action at Australia’s premier facility for the study of such things – the Craneo Facial unit at the Adelaide Children’s hospital

Why do you need to learn how to use your voice correctly you may ask.  Well, again to put it succinctly, if you want to speak so that people will want to listen to you, understand what you are saying and go a away remembering what it is you were telling them about, you need a voice that will compliment all environments – whether it be the intimate setting of a boardroom presentation for six or projecting your voice to the back of a room that seats three hundred without a microphone – and you want to do all this using a technique that will help you forget about nerves and embarrassment – then breathing and correct voice projection are the key.

And if I haven’t taught you that by the end of this now twelve minutes, at least I will have embarrassed you enough so that you will never feel that emotion again.  And he – maybe you’ll have a little fun in the process.

So – first we have to start with posture.  It helps to breathe and project your voice correctly if you body is properly aligned.  Now I could put you through a year of exercises that will have you almost continually lying on your back but you might fall asleep and we don’t have enough time for that so essentially what you need to know is this:

Stand with your feet should width apart – a technique that’s particularly handy if you have to stand for long periods of time.

Ensure that your knees are loose and flexible so that you can move quickly if you have to.

Relax your stomach so that the diaphragm can work properly.

And allow the air to move freely in and out – either through the nose or mouth, I don’t care, without you restricting it with a tight throat.

Ever noticed how your throat gets tight when you’re nervous.  And are you noticing now that you’re concentrating on it that it’s actually hard to relax it.

The Answer to that is to loosen up your body so that you can forget about your throat.

And a quick way to do this is…

Now lets see if your body is relaxed enough to try that posture again.  Everybody put one or both hands on your belly and imagine that when you breath in, your breath goes right down to that part of your stomach and that when you breath out, that is where the breath comes from.

OK, now we’ll try to put a bit of voice with it.

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