Freeing the Natural Voice

Kristin Linklater

The workshop will explore exercises for freeing the breathing musculature and releasing impulses of thought and feeling into words.
The actor must become conscious enough of the involuntary breathing mechanism to enhance its function without controlling it. This is so that breath responds naturally and spontaneously to impulses of thought and feeling. Deep psycho-physical reconditioning in the whole process of communication is necessary if the actor is to be the kind of performer audiences love because s/he is believable, untrammeled by convention, emotionally and imaginatively daring and - let’s say, transparent.
Actors must dissolve the defense mechanisms that protect them from emotional danger and learn not to hold their breath at heightened moments but to let emotional impulse activate the diaphragm, intercostals and inner abdominals into involuntary response.
Counter-productive terms for breath work include: breath CONTROL, breath SUPPORT, breath MANAGEMENT. The diaphragm is the emotional muscle. The diaphragm is not a voluntary muscle. We cannot actively move it. Yet it is the primary breathing muscle. We must learn how to influence it. When we hand over expressive controls to accessory breathing muscles (such as the rectus abdominis or transversus) we lose that precious alive contact between feelings and breath in favor of - yes - management, control -describing emotional content but not transparently revealing it.

Kristin Linklater,
Theatre Division,
School of the Arts,
Columbia University,
New York

Address for June, July, August:
Housegarth, Quoyloo, Orkney, KW16 3LY, Scotland
Tel: 44 01856 841 798
Email: k.linklater@yahoo.com