Chopping and Linking
Chopping and Linking Words that begin with vowels pose a challenge to actors. How to speak these sounds? When anything begins with a vowel, there is a tendency to initiate the sound with a glottal attack. This is done by …
Category: Speech
Tempo: Dragging, Slow, Medium, Fast, and Rushing
“Faster, Louder, Funnier”: Actors often joke about how directors of comedies really only have one note. And part of that note has to do with tempo, the rate at which the actors speak. And more often than not, the demand …
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Energized, De-Energized and Over-Energized
Performing requires a balance of a huge number of factors that can make or break your ability to communicate effectively. Breath and sound, thought and emotion, action and reaction, ease and effort. As you perform, you release energy through your …
Endings
Final consonants deserve a fair bit of attention in a speech warm-up. That’s because there is a range of articulations available to the actor that are, for most people, beyond what we do in everyday speech. As contemporary everyday speech …
Beginnings
Aspiration As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, everything has a beginning, middle and end. In terms of speech, awareness of beginnings and endings is helpful is varying your performance for different settings, from the most intimate on-mic technique, to the most challenging …