Voice and Speech

Berg Studios is excited to announce a new Voice and Speech Intensive taught by the Yale School of Drama’s Joby Earle!

Voice work is a path to bringing our homework into a living, breathing reality. Through a practiced awareness of our breath, voice, and selves, actors can unlock immense performative potential.

Whether it be on set, on location, or in a theater, actors must have ready access to a free and open means of expression.

In this class, we will learn tools to help gently dismantle the psychophysical habits that inhibit our full expression. We will then learn new habits that support our work, ideas, and creativity in any performative medium.

Exercises will be introduced that gently coax tension to release and
give us new consciousness of how our own, personal voice works. We will then move to text to see how these new tools can be put to immediate and practical use.

Voice work helps release your performance from the clutches of your conscious control. It lets your passion and talent take over. Through diligence and regular practice, we will experience a free breath, voice, and self while performing.
Workshop Description: VOICE & SPEECH

Class 1: Introduction to Physical Awareness, Anatomy of breathing

Class 2: Re-Approaching Sound

Class 3: Support and Sending

Class 4: Resonation and Amplification

Class 5: Articulation

Class 6: Warm-up/individual text work

Class 7: Warm-up/into individual text work

Class 8: Self-led warm up with coaching, individual text work, closing

For a long while now, Berg and the instructors here at the studio have worried about a serious lack of vocal training among our students. This lack of training is not just about volume, to be sure. Without the ability to fully utilize their voice, no actor can be counted on to express themselves in the dynamic, creative way our industry demands.

Indeed, the purpose of vocal training, a standard element of all conservatory acting programs throughout the world, is to free the actor’s habitual patterns of tension. This allows the vocal instrument to express character via the actor’s imagination and engage the listener with language written by another but spoken as our own. Similar to building new muscles at the gym, vocal work takes sustained and intentional practice, which gradually leads to a shift in the actor’s use of their voice as the vehicle of emotion. This class focuses on relaxation, body and breath work as the foundation for free expression, and will consist of some active floor and movement work.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR: Joby Early has performed at Lincoln Center, Playwrights Horizons, Yale Rep, South
Coast Rep, A.R.T., The Berkshire Theater Festival, The Huntington Theater, Center Theater Group, and The Geffen Playhouse. His television credits include The Blacklist, The Exorcist, and The Good Fight. He holds a BFA from NYU;s
Tisch School of the arts and an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. He has been teaching actors since 2006 and has taught at Columbia, NYU, Yale as well as at the City College of New York. His background as a voice teacher is based on the combined works of Kristin Linklater and Katherine Fitzmaurice as taught by master teachers Walton Wilson and Grace Zandarski. He has also studied with Andrew Wade, former head of voice at the Royal Shakespeare Company
WORKSHOP DETAILS:

When:

Tuesdays and Fridays
1 pm to 3 pm
June, 14th, 17th, 21st, 23rd, and 28th
July, 1st, 5th, and 8th.

Where:

The Berg Studios Annex
3273 Casitas Ave
Suite 105
Los Angeles (Atwater Village), CA 90039

Cost:

$280 for 8 classes**