Chichester session explores the art of speaking Shakespeare
The Readiness is All is the title – and it is also the key to it all as actor, writer and theatre practitioner Mike Jenkins offers Speaking Shakespeare for Performance.
Mike is promising the chance to break through the barriers of speaking Shakespeare in a voice, speech and acting workshop on Saturday, March 15 from 2.15pm-5pm at The New Park Centre, Jubilee Hall, Chichester. £20 with concessions available; book on www.michaeljenkins.co.uk or email [email protected].
The session is suitable for 16+ A-Level drama and theatre studies, performing arts students, drama school and theatre school students, university students, adult acting students and anyone who has a passion for the spoken word, for Shakespeare and for the art of acting.
The workshop will introduce you to: a professional actor’s voice warm-up (breath, body, speech muscles); techniques to free the voice and explore the meaning and emotion contained in the words; the power of Shakespearean verse, meter, iambic and other devices and clues that Shakespeare gives us; speaking to other performers in a unique group-speaking exercise; using your voice as an instrument, overcoming fear of classical and heightened text through voice-play; and rehearsal techniques and short masterclass-style coaching, culminating in performances at the end of the session.
“Using sonnets, speeches and dialogues from scenes, you’ll explore text exercises that reveal the meaning and power of the words. You’ll leave with a toolbox of practical exercises you can use to work on any text for performance and you’ll have had first-hand experience of what it feels like to speak Shakespeare for performance.”
Mike added: “It is about being true to the words and what that means is that you have got to understand what is happening. That’s one of the big barriers. You have to connect with what is happening to the character and what they are saying about the way that they think about it. You've got to dispel this idea that it has got to be spoken beautifully. You've got to listen to the many emotional clues about the emotional journey in the words that are being spoken. The essence is speaking it engagingly and connecting with why the character is saying what they're saying and how they communicate it.
“Culturally our attitude to Shakespeare is very holy. That comes from old films and certain older styles of acting, and many people have experienced as students or as adults that they have heard the actor’s voice but they have not heard what is being said. It just feels like a lot of clever-sounding words that sound beautiful but you are not sure what is happening. But if you listen to, for instance, David Tennant, you might not understand every word but you really sense his being Macbeth. There's a lot of craft that goes into that. There's a lot of work in him getting to that stage and getting his apparatus ready and primed to speak the text. And that's what I want to give people, a toolbox of physical and vocal exercises that prepare the voice to speak the heightened text.
“People go wrong because they're trying to sound like a Shakespearean actor rather than asking the question about what is happening to Macbeth in this moment, what does it mean to have doubt. But also people do not prepare enough sometimes. It's like running a marathon for an actor. You've got to have the breath to be able to cope with the language spoken, and you've got to have the speech muscles to speak these complicated words and you have got to be able to link with the emotional journey of the character.”