Voice & Delivery - breathing 1
Welcome to a new feature that, hopefully, will give a bit of a boost to your performance by improving the quality of your voice and delivery in performance.
My name is Chris Dawson and I am an actress and ex BBC radio presenter, living in Stratford-upon-Avon. I work mostly in small-scale local or touring productions.
It’s quite difficult to give a voice warm up lesson online, but over the next few weeks I hope to give you a few pointers - and if I’m telling you things that you, as a seasoned performer, already know, then please excuse me. I have no wish to patronise you but I don’t know what you know, if you know what I mean! Similarly, if there is a particular concern you have that I don’t mention, please feel free to point that out and I will do my best to cover it.
We’re going to start with posture; you can’t use your voice effectively if your body is working against you with poor posture. This is a simple trick that dancers use to align everything - you don’t have to do it all the time but it helps make you aware of how your body should be aligned. Stand in front of a (preferably full length) mirror, let your knees sag a bit, your shoulders round, your chest hollow, your tum and bum droop - then imagine you have a piece of elastic internally joining your belly button with your bum - shorten that elastic. Sounds weird I know but it really works - everything falls magically in to place and your posture is perfect but not forced.
Okay - breath next. Sound daft but most people don’t know how to breathe. Go back to the mirror, take an enormous breath in, as big as you possibly can, and watch what happens with your body - don’t read any further ‘til you’ve done this!!!!!!!!!! And don’t cheat on that one - it’s important that you make the observation.
So what happened? - I’m guessing your shoulders rose as you inhaled? - most people’s do and that indicates that you’re not really using your lungs. Lie on the floor and put one hand lightly on your abdomen the other on your diaphragm - breath in deeply through your nose and out through your mouth, stopping your shoulders from moving at the same time. The aim is to breathe right down through your body and make your abdomen rise and fall. Think of it like emptying one of those blow up pillows whilst rolling it up at the same time - you don’t want to empty it evenly you want the air to leave the bottom end first. If necessary use your hands to press a little to encourage you to breathe out properly and fully. Try and do it slowly but you don’t have to do it to a particular count or hold it between inspiration and expiration.
Once you feel comfortable with that - try aspirating the breath out. Just hhhhh - nice steady note - keep it going until every last bit of air is gone. Make sure your throat is nice and open for this - people with some accents find this a bit difficult, if you do - try doing the exercise with the expired hhhhh as a gentle unvoiced sound.
When you are confident you are breathing properly, and your throat is not closed off at all, start voicing the breath, try different sounds aaaaa, eeeee, ayyyyy, ohhhh, ooooo, it doesn’t matter which - just keep making them nice and loose and long - use all that breath properly. Speak them - sing them - do them a tone higher - and higher still - and when you think you’ve reached the top of your vocal range - do it one tone higher. Then go in to reverse and do it lower.
Once you can use your breath properly you can alternate doing the floor exercises with doing them sitting, standing etc - in the car is good, but make sure you drop your jaw - keep it loose. Looks odd when you’re driving, but as long as you don’t actually cause an accident - so what!
There is the possibility of running occasional voice workshops with one of the world’s leading voice coaches - Andrew Wade, ex head of voice at the Royal Shakespeare Company. The more people who are interested in doing this, the more feasible and cost effective it will be, so please email me if this might be of interest to you. There is no obligation at this point; I am simply trying to gauge numbers.
