voice and suzuki training

...finished teaching six days of Suzuki Actor Training workshop last Saturday, 18^th here in Melbourne, Australia. There were many things of note such as the approach to vocal training.

Because it's easy for such highly demanding physical exercises which focus on isolating effort in the 'centre' (the abdomen) - and this so happens to be where the voice is centred - actors who have done the work for a while can get into the habit of losing control and over-projecting their voice, thereby losing the ability to vary pitch, rhythm and tone associated with shifts in meaning, geography or body.

One way to practice variation (and by no means the only one), is to pay attention to the direction and distance of the focal point... I mean in terms of voice, the point to which one is speaking. I think I could perceive variation in the resonant volume and quality of the voice when the imagined distance between the actor and their focal point varied.

I have often wondered at the idea that if one is doing the Suzuki exercises truly, the body becomes energised; and because the voice is produced from the body, it too becomes energised. And I have seen it happen many times, that some kind of fakery is associated with this. That is, that actors are instructed to produce the voice with energy and this is interpreted to mean, speak with volume and that this volume may not be directly associated with the aesthetic of the body’s centre.

In some ways, Suzuki training is in opposition to the New York “method” based on Stanislavski's principle of social realism and the process of text analysis where variation to the rhythm and 'weight' of words according to meaning is done based on psychological tenets. In my own work, and having studied, in the West, the more traditional Stanislavski method of acting first, I often wondered if a contradiction in fact existed.

Meaning is important to communication and important to freeing the actor's voice. Tadashi Suzuki has developed training exercises which give the actor an alternative to the usual tools employed in mainstream Western theatre traditions. They are aimed at opening the door to a more archetypal existence onstage. I know from personal experience that it is possible to enjoy the communication of the meaning of text while adhering to the hyper-charged (!) modes of Suzuki training... is there a contradiction?

I think perhaps, the advent of shouted voice production seen in the Australian context of Suzuki training (and others?), is just a failure to analyse the real connection between voice and a communicative body.

To my view, it's more of a test, if in the first place, the voice is left to its own devices. Ask the inexperienced student to use their natural voice and see how the successful engagement of the body with Suzuki exercises varies the production of the voice.

In this way, the actor can analyse the difference between vocal production with and without the engagement of the natural animism of the body. In this workshop, short though it was, I think this idea started to show the signs of a true engagement.

It's dangerous territory. Because actor's walk into a workshop with many pre-conceptions about what their theatre is. The small world of naturalism that actors regurgitate so readily because they have been raised on non-sweating television fodder rears its pathetic head too easily.

But it is a worthy experiment if only to attempt to break actors from vocal habits in the same way that the ‘statues’ and other or all of the exercises help to analyse the habits of actors.

To me, it was of great value to see people approaching the work for the first time and paying attention to the vocal aspect of the body from the outset. I think it was certainly rewarding to establish consideration of the relationship of vocal technique with the body early.

It’s an investigation to be continued, but it may be a topic for discussion? I would imagine many others have faced this issue in the past?

regards

Matt

p.s. if you're in the States here's where you do Suzuki training:

http://siti.org/training/

...finished teaching six days of Suzuki Actor Training workshop last Saturday, 18th. There were many things of note such as the approach to vocal training that we took.

Because it's easy for such highly demanding physical exercises which focus on isolating effort in the 'centre' (the abdomen) - and this so happens to be where the voice is centred - actors who have done the work for a while can get into the habit of losing control and over-projecting their voice, thereby losing the ability to vary pitch, rhythm and tone asssociated with shifts in meaning.

One way to practice variation (and by no means the only one), is to pay attention to the direction and distance of the focal point... the point to which one is speaking... in the workshop just finished, it was good to see that by changing the imagined distance between the actor and their focal point the resonant volume and quality of the voice varied.

I have often wondered at the idea that if one is doing the Suzuki exercises truly, the body becomes energised, and because the voice is produced from the body, it too becomes energised. And I have seen it happen many times, that some kind of fakery is associated with this. That is, that actors are instructed to produce the voice with energy and this is interpreted to mean, speak with volume.

In some ways, Suzuki training is in opposition to the New York method based on Stanislavski's principle of social realism and the process of text analysis where variation to the rhythm and 'weight' of words according to meaning is done based on psychological tenets. In my own work, and having studied, in the West, the more traditional Stanislavski method of acting first, I often wondered if such a contradiction in fact existed.

Meaning is important to communication and important to freeing the actor's voice. Mr. Suzuki has developed training exercises which give the actor an alternative to the usual tools employed in mainstream Western theatre traditions. They are aimed at opening the door to a more archetypal existence onstage.

I know from personal experience that it is possible to pay attention to the communication of the meaning of text while adhering to the modes of Suzuki training... I don't see a contradiction. I think perhaps, the advent of shouted voice production so often seen in the Australian context of Suzuki training (and others?), is just a failure to analyse the real connection between the voice and the body.

To my view, it's more of a test, if the voice is left to it's own devices. Tell the inexperienced student to use their natural voice and see how the successful engagement of the body with Suzuki exercises varies the production of the voice. In this workshop, short though it was, I think this idea started to show the signs of a true engagement.

It's dangerous territory. Because actor's walk into a workshop with many pre-conceptions about what their theatre is. The small world of naturalism that actors regurgitate so readily because they have been raised on non-sweating television acting, rears its pathetic head too easily.

But it is a worthy experiment if only to attempt to break actors from vocal habits in the same way that the statues (and other) exercises help to analyse the habits of actors.

To me, it was of great value to see people approaching the work for the first time and paying attention to the vocal aspect of the body from the outset. This is surely an investigation to be continued, but it may be an a topic for discussion? I would imagine many others have faced this issue in the past?

regards

Matt

I will continue this at some later stage.

happy days

just saw happy days at Malthouse. Beckett wrote this 1960-61 and it is still deliciously devastating. I think the delicious is because Julie Forsyth is so deadly good... the idea that someone is buried in a mound of earth and must pass the time filing one's nails... leave the revolver nearby in case you get the courage... wait for exactly the right impulse to sing the song or tell the favourite story before the bell rings signaling sun-down, lights out... is dire. So Happy Days is ironic yes? Julie, dear Julie gives us; no, she gives Beckett's most crushing statement on existence with twinkle. The set_Anna Cordingly, lighting _Paul Jackson, direction_Michael Kantor... and Julie's offsider Peter Carroll coalesce into a fairground living hell. I saw Julie do this play at Anthill... a looooong time ago; I was impressed with her then, (was it the first time I saw her perform?), and I'm super, uber-impressed now. Not that anyone reads blogs... but if just one person were to read this, then I say to you - GO SEE IT!! This must be seen. Truly. It is one of the great renditions of one of the great plays of the 'modern' era.

un-sustainable rort

It's time!

Set stringent targets for the carbon trade scheme of 40% from the outset and provide no , that’s right ZERO incentives for carbon-based industries to pollute. Yes, this will send shock waves through our economy, yes jobs will be lost in those industries, yes share prices will plummet, yes the stock exchange indices will head South, but we have reached an opportune tipping point NOW.

It's time not to give quarter to polluters but to invest in research and development aimed at making solar, thermal, wind and wave power base-load capable.

Am I daft? To me there is a beautiful simplicity to the relationship of the global economic downturn (read crisis) and the environmental catastrophe approaching. One solves the other.

If Rudd and cohort (including those pesky independents) provide base-load investment with the objective of achieving base-load alternative energy, where alternative energy industries become the major players of the 21st century economy, then jobs will be created and the stock market will once more be of a Northerly persuasion - guaranteeing happy futures for the Macquarie millionaires – maybe even privately-funded superannuants. Win for investors; win for the environment.

Look, this isn’t rocket science. In the first place, use the billions currently ear-marked to prop up old styles of industry, to establish state-run solar facilities. Go down to the banks of the Murray where all those farmers are no longer able to farm due to current levels of warming, salination and loss of water supply, buy their land and start erecting solar cells – billions of them. Or else ask the farmers to farm energy instead of cotton. The workers that are being sacked from carbon-based industries can work there! That’s a tough re-deployment I know, but these are and will be increasingly tough times. Hell, I’ll go down and work there if you need me to. (So long as they have fibre-optics).

If that is done in concert with an injection of infrastructural support to alternative energy research facilities, then in ten years time, maybe less, these alternative energy sources, or perhaps ones not yet imagined, will become base-load capable.

The alternative is that in 2050, my 18 year-old son will be sitting in a city-sized apartment block (not of itself such a bad idea) in a Blade Runner distopia, with his permanent respirator, condensing drinking water from a container he filled in Port Phillip bay, and not breeding with his wife because he knows his generation will be the last on the planet.

It’s time to act now. Stop bowing to the carbon lobby and make some forthright decisions for our children’s future. I voted Labour at the last election not because I wanted a thousand bucks, but because I thought Labour was serious about two-things, industrial reform, and forthright action on the environment.

Carbon-based industries SHOULD NOT be making a profit from polluting the environment – alternative energy industry should.

• Carbon-based industry SHOULD NOT receive any pollution permits.
• Projected expenditure for pollution permits SHOULD be re-deployed to postive inititiatives such as alternative energy research and development.
• Stringent targets SHOULD be set – 40% is a good place to start; 5% would be laughable if it wasn’t sickening.
• Major investment in alternative energy facilities and research and development SHOULD be started TODAY – allocate 20 billion TODAY.

What “ordinary middle income families” want is a sustainable future; that is what the Rudd government was mandated to do – so do it.

As a post-script, nuclear energy is not an option. The plants require enormous amounts of carbon-based energy to run and after all this time, scientists and nuclear energy execs have still no idea what to do with the waste produced.

Lisa Roet's exhibition

Today I went to see Lisa Roet's exhibition at the Karen Woodbury Gallery http://www.kwgallery.com/

Lisa has been studying and rendering apes ... do you call them primates? for lots of years, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised to see gigantic bronze sculptures of primate hands in the centre of the gallery floor; or charcoal on paper, wall-size, of hands of a primate... the renders are disturbing because they are life-like yet oversized, such detailed up-scale studies, truncated at the wrist... one can feel the age in the wrinkles, sense some experience through the shadow, understand something of the life of a creature whose attributes seem close to our own in the life-lines rendered here.

It's been many years since I last saw a roet exhibition, the concern is the same, but the manifestations are evolving. There's a kind of kitsch political... the work was political way-back, I remember that. Just seeing such careful study brought to the viewer... the muscle yet minutiae of the charcoal on the rough paper... I remember that; but now, there are neon style lights surrounding life-like gorilla heads. Like these critters are on display for us - catch them quick before they disappear! they seem to shout.

I don't know my primates very well, so I have to call them primates - instead of macaccas or orang-utans - I've been to Malaysia, so I know orang-utan means something like original man... makes you think. I think of this because one of the works, Target 1 has an Asian looking man - a kind of death mask, eyes closed... meditating? dead? surrounded by neon lit rifle cross-hairs... and the sculputre is repeated several times, with different apes at the centre of the cross-hairs.

I suppose merely by associating the ape to the human Lisa Roet makes statement about the ephemerality of our exhistence? that if we think the apes are on their way out because we cut down so much of their habitat, then by logic, we would be next?

Or else, this is an indegenous Malay (Roet has lived in Malaysia, done residencies in the jungle I think), and the statement is about the dissappearence of their ways... as the Kuala Lumpur urban encroaches further and furtherer into the depths of the jungle.

The exhibition is only on for a few more days, go check it - really worth the time.

some people don't like pea and ham soup

Is it swine flu? is it the colour? is it the fat? is it the pig skin? is it because of religious sensitivities? If you go to your local supermarket, to the deli section, and ask the person wearing the mandatory surgical headwear for three nice sized pieces of bacon bones, then go to the 'grains' aisle and buy yourself some split green peas, celery head, one carrot and one onion, then take them home, put them in a pot for a many hours simmering, you will have the most wholesome, cheap, easy to cook meal that can sit in your fridge FOR A WEEK, getting thick and stodgy. And the farts... you have no idea.

But some people don't like this. It's clear. Some people have told me they like vegetable and ham soup. That's a poor cousin. That's like asking for pastrami and rye on white bread. The green peas... now here's a point for the biologists, are green peas that you buy in the supermarket in packets the same as green peas that grow in satchels on trees only dry?

pea and ham soup. I finished ours up last night and I'm off to the super to get the makings for another batch. I better buy some incense.