VOICE BREATH AND CREATIVITY (Part 1)

Your voice is an extraordinarily powerful means of engagement, one that can inspire confidence, fear, joy or hope; persuade, command, uplift; calm or incite a crowd, charm or reassure a loved one; voice your creative ideas, as an individual, team member or leader, so they reverberate out into the world.

We are born with free voices, voices alive to our thought/feeling impulses. As we grow and navigate the world around us (our home environment, the classroom, popular culture, and so on) we acquire tensions, inhibitions, habits of self use, that can diminish the freedom and efficiency of the natural voice, too often to the point of distorted communication.

The emphasis in this Method is to remove the blocks that inhibit your human instrument, and then to strengthen and refine your self-use.

This four-week experiential series will begin a process of recognizing and undoing these acquired habits and blocks, and developing resonance and clarity, through a series of exercises drawn from the Linklater Method /Freeing the Natural Voice. 

Developed by Kristin Linklater, internationally renowned teacher and leader of her own purpose-built voice centre in Orkney, Scotland, the Linklater Method: Freeing The Natural Voice has been honed over many decades and is widely taught in actor training programs, to professional speakers, teachers, broadcasters, trial lawyers, politicians, clergy, community organizers, executives and leaders in for- and non-profit fields, as well as anyone who simply would like to be heard more easily, have a wider range of expression, communicate more fully and clearly.

Voice, Breath and Creativity Part 1
self-paced online course w/ Corinna May

Intro to Linklater Voice: Voice, Breath and Vision

Week 1:
Drawing Your Voice
Physical Awareness: the Spine as a Channel For Sound

Week 2:
Breath Awareness: Restoring Spontaneity

Week 3:
Releasing Vibrations: Speaking from the Source

Week 4:
Amplifying Vibrations: Freeing Jaw, Tongue and Soft Palate

You will come away with a new experience of your voice, an understanding of how to practice, and a blueprint for putting together a short voice warmup to use before teaching, leading a meeting, giving a talk, or simply to feel more ease and confidence in speaking anywhere.

Course Includes:

• 4 online workshops with Corinna May (75 min each)

• 2 Intro workshops: Voice, Breath & Vision & Drawing Your Voice (90 min & 35 min)

• A collection of video & audio downloads for you to keep

“This approach to voice is designed to liberate the natural voice and thereby develop a vocal technique that serves the freedom of human expression.”

“The basic assumption of the work is that everyone possesses a voice capable of expressing, through a two-to four-octave natural pitch range, whatever gamut of emotion, complexity of mood, and subtlety of thought he or she experiences.

“The natural voice is transparent, it reveals, not describes, inner impulses of emotion and thought, directly and spontaneously....The person is heard, not the person’s voice.”

                                          -Kristin Linklater

Ed Woodall, Feldenkrais practitioner shares his experience:

“A highlight was experiencing a much better voice. The series was an ideal way for me to process my love of the Feldenkrais Method and get some help with improving my vocal production in the long term. I felt that being more attentive to my breath made me slow down and be softer with myself and those around me.

I experienced a profound shift each lesson. My ease, happiness and ability to communicate were most effected.

The 1:1 session really highlighted how emotional my relationship with my voice is and how much I want to pursue this kind of study to help me be closer to what I would call my true self.”

Sonja Schneider, Feldenkrais Practitioner shares her experience:

“Finding a more free voice confronted me on a very deep level with my self-image of a very adapted person, that only feels safe, when she is what people expect her to be… It was not the voice, I didn't like when I heard my self speaking – it was the underlying oppressed emotions and not expressed parts of my self, that I heard…

As a practitioner I can talk more freely from deep inside without fear of being truly in touch with the people I am speaking to. I learned to address my words and vibrations, that have a meaning, directly to others. I don't fear so much anymore to make mistakes or not to be liked if I show my true self… in small steps of course… not everything has totally changed, but I feel a subtle, yet powerful shift.”

A musician’s experience:

"Immediately after yesterday’s class I drove to a gig thinking about how Corinna said to “honor the no” which I interpreted as to “hold space” for it—which definitely resonated with me but is also very vague—so I wasn’t sure how to practically walk it out other than to have some self-compassion and not fear, stuff down, or push through the impulse that resists my freedom to express. I’ve done so many somatic approaches to trauma as well as NLP, EFT, hypnosis, etc, but I’m recently discovering this idea of “listening” to the self and body, but no one really describes how to do it in much detail.

However, as I started singing at my gig last night my voice felt so unusually at ease and it was actually pleasurable to sing (for the first time in literally over 1000 gigs.) The little, “no,” inside quickly turned into, “that was easy and fun, what else can I do?” I took more risks than ever and played with my voice in front of an audience in a way I never have before. I have a gig tomorrow night and will rewatch the class to warm up and see what happens. It’s worth nothing that I hurt my neck over the weekend and have a lot of pain and stiffness, so it’s kind of unbelievable that my already tense voice felt so free especially with the added inhibition from the injury.

Thanks again for hosting this class. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on voice training over the years but nothing has helped me half as much as the past 4 weeks. I hope you do another one!"

More experiences from the series:

About Corinna May:

Corinna works and plays in the storytelling realm, as an actor, teacher, director, writer, voice artist, and voice consultant. She has performed in NY and regional theatre in classical, modern, and new plays, spent two years on the Broadway tour of THE GRADUATE, appeared in film, on television, in radio plays, and narrated audio books. A 30-year member of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, MA, Corinna is a critically-acclaimed leading company actor (33+ roles and counting), and a senior faculty member in S&Co’s internationally- renowned Training and Education programs. She is a Designated Linklater Voice Teacher and a graduate of the NY Feldenkrais Method training program, one of only a handful of people in the world to be trained in both of these powerful methods.

Corinna collaborated with Feldenkrais trainer Arlyn Zones on the recently-published DVD set "Voice, Breath & Posture”, and is honored to continue to join with Arlyn in teaching public workshops, synergizing the Feldenkrais & Linklater methods. She has taught acting and/or voice at Smith, MIT, Syracuse University, and many other schools, and currently teaches Voice and Speech at the Actors Studio Drama School MFA/Pace University. Corinna is a lead trainer/USA with Cornell Voice Advisory/Australia. She has an extensive private coaching practice serving actors, lawyers, executives, politicians, academics, clergy, broadcasters, voice professionals, and anyone who is Voice-curious. Corinna is a proud Union member: AEA, SAG-AFTRA, UAFP, and a graduate of Barnard College and Circle-in-the-Square Theatre School