Activating the North Dragon

Today we had a great one to one voice session with Danielle Meunier. There is one particular scene in the piece that requires a lot of shouting and each time we rehearse it, we come away with very sore throats! So we asked her if she could come in and give us some tips on how to do this without straining our voices. We focused a lot on breath, as this is how we can carry the sound without holding everything in our throats. We looked at sighs of relief, short, medium and long and then adding voice to those sighs. This stopped us from getting the sound stuck in our throats and instead bringing it all from deeper in the body. We focused on this for a long time before moving on to exercises that focused on activating our dragons (a.k.a resonators). This is always a little hard to explain, but we began making sound using resonators in our chest (north dragon) , the roof of the mouth (dragon of the mediterranean) and the face/teeth (south dragon). We used these individually and then moved on to using all three at the same time, in order to get the biggest sound possible, without it getting stuck in the throat. We then applied these exercises (with Danielle's help) to the scenes we needed them for and voila! The scene became a million times better. We went over it several times and she also gave us some techniques for how to deliver the lines. The scene started to have more energy, more power and an overall better quality. So we will be 100% be applying Danielle's work to the rest of the piece and hopefully the difference will be noticed!

We only have one more week left of rehearsals now until it's tech week! Then the show is TWO WEEKS TODAY! Which is just absolutely mad. It feels like yesterday we formed this company and it feels so good to see how far we've come. We've put our absolute all into this performance to make it the best it can be and we can't wait to show it to the world.

We hope you can make it!

TinCan X