CONTACT ME DIRECTLY TO SET UP A PRIVATE SESSION or PHONE or SKYPE CONSULT
DialectCoachCL@Outlook.com | 970-214-3735
With me you can work on any range of issues related to voice including:
Accents and Dialects - I can coach any dialect of English. If I haven't coached it before (and I probably have) I can learn it and be ready to teach it to you in short order.
Beginning, Intermediate and Advanced Vocal Technique for the Film, Television, Radio, Voiceover, and the Stage
Fitzmaurice Destructuring and Restructuring - for an overview of Fitzmaurice Voicework please visit www.fitzmauricevoice.com
Speech and Articulation (Including the International Phonetic Alphabet - IPA)
Issues of Vocal Health - Losing Voice, Raspy Voice, Strained Voice, etc.
Text Coaching - From Film to Shakespeare and everything in between
Singing and Musical Theatre and Opera (Must Provide Own Accompaniment)
How to integrate vocal and physical training into acting work
Acting Coaching also provided
ACCENTS for ACTORS
As a trained and experienced actor myself, I am very familiar with most actor training methods and understand how to support your process as an actor.
The goal in accent work is for the accent to be fully integrated into the actor’s impulses and the story being told. It has to live and breathe!!
At the same time, of course, it has to be accurate and consistent. I am expert in both sides of this process and my technical knowledge of and facility with accents is top-of-the-line, and I know how to work with actors.
I am extremely passionate about both art and spoken language, and I try to bring this into the room with me every time I coach!
I am a Teacher of various methodologies and primarily teach from the perspective of Knight-Thompson Speechwork, a revolutionary method for acquiring expertise in speech skills and accent acquisition. I hope the methods in this brand of speechwork will prove as revelatory to you as they were to me as a developing artist!
AMERICAN ENGLISH
I work with clients—actors, non-actors, executives, and the like; native and non-native speakers of English—to design and perfect an appropriate ‘unaccented’ American English accent*.
News Flash!!! There’s no one-size-fits-all American accent—what is often called ‘General’ American is more the absence of certain marked features than it is a single accent or dialect.
I always take a client-specific approach.
For non-actors, intelligibility should probably be our main goal, then a native speaker-like accent will be a secondary consideration, if we even use one at all.
For actors being able to sound like a native speaker of American English is a useful skill, as it broadens the range of potential casting!
NOTE: This work is usually called accent ‘reduction.’ I don't like this term, as it implies that there’s such a thing as not having an accent. There’s not—every human being on the earth speaks with an accent. Whatever we call it, the work is pretty much the same. I prefer to describe it as accent acquisition and modification!
VOICE—ACTORS
The voice and the breath are directly connected to the actor’s emotional and imaginative life. When an actor’s breath or voice is constrained or compromised, her acting will be, too. By working to free the voice, we also free the emotional life and the imagination.
Human beings are designed to use their voices in a wonderfully synchronized, way. Using what I call 'energized release". This sort of use is quite natural to babies who can cry FOREVER and never lose or damage their voices. But as we age we develop physical habits that inhibit this process. A central benefit of effective voice work is the rediscovery of the natural use of the voice that we have forgotten or relinquished.
We all have habitual patterns of holding in the body. Voice and Speech work seeks to release and replace these tensions, thereby finding greater movement and flow in the body and breath, integrating voice work with the whole of the actor’s instrument.
From this place of freedom and flow, I teach the physical skills of effective and efficient support, combined with a particular set of insights into how we use our voices to affect others.
I also teach from the perspective of Fitzmaurice Voicework™. It is by no means the only approach I use in my coaching— I also make liberal use of the techniques, philosophy & exercises of Cicely Berry, Patsy Rodenburg, Kristen Linklater and Arthur Lessac—but it is the most efficient, effective, and holistic approach I know of for effecting fundamental change in an actor’s use of his or her vocal instrument.
