Unit 17: Developing Voice for the Actor

VOCAL WARM UP FOR BEGINNERS - Daily routine...

1. Stand up straight in neutral, shoulders back and hands on your stomach. Allow your stomach muscles relax.
2. Breathe in through your nose and fill up your abdomen first (you will need to feel it and see it as it expands.)
3. Hold in this breath and count to ten.
4. Then, now slowly exhale.

National Theatre 

Voice:

Vocal exercises are part of an actor’s working life. In ancient Greek times, it was the greatest actors, those with the physical gift of a beautiful voice and a strong diaphragm, that were the actors and public speakers. There are references in some Shakespeare's plays to the vocal exercising of an actor before performance and the importance of enunciation and volume. 

There are many types of vocal exercises, and each addresses a different part of the vocal mechanism. You can look at each component as a cog in a machine that,

when put together, 

will aid understandable and natural sounding speech that can easily be heard at the back of an auditorium. In this collection Jeannette Nelson, Head of Voice, takes actors through a warm up and a series of exercises typical for actors in rehearsal at the National Theatre.

Voice Care before performing...

Theory is, it is important to at least drink a mix of warm water honey or glycerine anything to enable nourishing those vital vocal chords in your fragile throat.

Vocal warm up is crucial as it helps to loosen up your opening of the vocal chords.

• Most actors favour the ALEXANDER technique in order to loosen up your whole body and open the airflow from the lungs.