Voice

Voice

I had several classes working with voice, exploring it.
Working with Glen Noble I explored voice in relation to pressure, expression, eye contact. I found myself quite shy of my voice. I felt comfortable telling a phrase whispering, but as soon as it got louder, I didn't feel very comfortable, especially when i had direct eye contact with someone.
However, some exercises helped me a bit, like using pressure from inside, screaming it out while some person holds you physically, trying to pull you to the opposite side as you try to. The expression as "screaming out the stress" helped me allowing really work with my voice. It was the first step of breaking and working out my fears and distrust in myself.
The next step was taken working with another person. we were working with tenses and pains, also the articulation of our voice. I didn't noticed how important different parts of my body can be, like my chest, ribs, diaphragm. We used some yoga exercise to open it. We also noticed how our ribs moves in relation to breathing and how it can affect using our voice. A journey thru my body laying on the ground, starting from the head, the face to my feet allowed me to loose tenses and pains. It works noticing and feeling the pain, recognising it, accepting it, agreeing, overreacting by "sending" more blood into this space and then just letting it go. It allowed me to avoid stress and I felt more open-minded and more available to do things and keep going. All these things are related to voice, because of softening face, chest and other body parts in order to articulate better. I found the ways to work with my articulation and voice by doing some exercises of sounds, letters, words and sentences.
One more class with Glen was about voice extension in our body,  I found different parts in the body related to voice, like voice in the bottom, voice where diaphragm is, voice in mouth, in the back and front part of it, voice in nose, in eye or even higher level. We worked going thru the levels, explored voice changes moving. The most surprised thing was that I found, by shaking body without any efforts of diaphragm using only breath my voice still moves. It is like a ball inside,which you can move as you like and find voice and sound changes.
The last session related to voice was with Florance. This time we actually worked with voice, text, volume and sound using a lot. I felt more free and allowed myself to explore and use it in different ways. It was a mix of working with voice, theater elements and dancing.
It was really useful and I really felt the development of my own voice using and understanding of my abilities.

Running phrase
  This is a short running phrase, which we explored during the technique class. It looks quite simple, but there are so many things to think about doing it. First thing to think about are feet, which have to be soft and articulated and you always have to put the heel down. Knees also have to be soft and adaptable. the most impressive thing for me was thinking about leading part of the body. Going forwards pelvic is leading and running backwards whole back leads, whole spine area. Interesting thing to notice is that changing direction the most important are feet movements. Additional thing personally for me to think about are eyes, because i look down instead of holding my glance straight. I think it is related to focusing, but i still need to work it out, because it also may affect my neck possition.