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VOICE SESSIONS!

Today we met with Danielle Meunier for the first half of our voice coaching sessions. During our time at university we have all been fortunate enough to receive voice coaching from Danielle, but it's been a long time since any of us have had one of these sessions. So Danielle set up a couple of classes for the whole year group to give us a bit of a recap.

We had an hour with Danielle today and we mostly focused on breath and how we can use our bodies to improve the quality of sound from our voices. Firstly we did a physical warm up, to get the body ready for all this breath intake and vocal exercise! This mostly involved tapping and manipulating the muscles in the body to wake them up. We also did lots of stretches to open up the body, ready to 'fill it with breath'. Although we can't physically fill in these empty spaces in the body with breath, it helps us to visualise the use of the whole body and how we can use it to enhance our voices.

The first exercise entailed us walking around the room and stopping every time we needed to breath out. We then needed to sigh on the out-breath. This exercise got us thinking and making us aware of our breath as well as helping us to map out the space. As a group this was really useful for us. At the moment we think we'll have a lot of spoken text in the piece. This kind of warm up will be crucial for our voices for our performance. Being aware of our breath will help us to deliver lines fluidly as well as enable us to project our voices in the large space without straining our voices. We then began to physicalise this exercise by lifting our arms above our head on the in-breath and releasing them on the out-breath. This was to focus on release and how the movement of the body (the drop of the arms) affects the breath. We then began to add sound to this exercise. On every out-breath we would add sound to the sigh, which led us on to the next part of the class.

The next part of the exercise focused on resonators. We would take a breath in and on the out-breath add sound to the sigh again. Whilst doing this though, we would bend our knees slightly and push the stomach in and out. This would force the voice to change. We did this several times before adding in movement to the chest. We would take a breath in and on the sigh out, we'd move the stomach and then tap the chest - a bit like a gorilla! Again, this would change the shape of the voice, as we were manipulating the natural resonators in the body. We continued to do this, adding in the lips and eventually pushing the sound out of our bodies as far as we could. We imagined our voices as paint that we wanted to splash on the walls.

All too soon though, the session came to an end. However it was really great to go over stuff we'd done in the past and remind ourselves of how important the voice is and how it's a tool that can be used to really enhance a piece. We can now take these exercises and bring them into rehearsals, in order to warm up our voices and that in turn should help us create quality material.

We'll keep you posted!

TinCan X