Bouncing the Lips
In this step of the Speech Warm-up Series, we look at the lips, and explore warming them up for a certain kind of sound: stop-plosives. We'll get to fricative sounds later in the series. The lips are important in the …
Author: Eric Armstrong
Eric Armstrong is the voiceguy. Eric is a dialect, voice, speech and text coach based in Toronto, Canada, where he normally teaches full-time at York University’s Dept. of Theatre. Eric has been teaching voice for the actor full-time since 1994, and has taught in Canada and the US, at the University of Windsor, Brandeis University, Roosevelt University, Canada's National Voice Intensive and York University. He has worked for nationally and internationally recognized companies such as Crow’s Theatre, Volcano, SoulPepper, & Canadian Stage in Toronto, and The Court Theatre and Steppenwolf in Chicago.
Eric holds a BFA from Concordia University (Montreal) in Theatre Performance, and an MFA from York University (Toronto) in Acting. His mentors were David Smukler (York, Canada’s National Voice Intensive) and Andrew Wade (Royal Shakespeare Company). He has also studied at the Drama Studio, London, and Il Stage Internazzionale di Commedia dell’Arte in Reggio Emilia, Italy.
He’s a long time member of the Voice and Speech Trainers Association, where he has served on the board, as a conference planner, photo editor for the Voice and Speech Review, Founding Director of Technology and Internet Services, and has written numerous peer-reviewed articles, essays and reviews for the VASTA Newsletter, the VASTA Voice, and The Voice and Speech Review.
Centering
Before we begin exploring our speech mechanism, I want us to take a moment to ground ourselves, and focus. The name of the game for speech work is awareness, and awareness arises when we can pay attention to the sensations …
Advanced Warm-up Conclusion
We've made it to the end of the Advanced Warm-up Series, and now you have at least 30 possible steps from the Basic, Intermediate and Advanced series that you can mix to create your own, personalized warm-up. Owning this material …
Text: Beginnings and Endings
Peter Brook is known for having championed the idea of "beginning, middle, and end" in everything on stage, including the beginning, middle and end of the play, the scene, the beat, the moment, the speech, the sentence, the phrase, the …
Articulation of L and N on the Gum Ridge
This post is available for download as an audio file. One of the things we work on a lot in my voice and speech classes is isolating the tongue from the jaw. Put simply, the goal is to train the …