I’m excited and honored to share that last summer I accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. It’s week eight of my first semester teaching at DGSD, and I’m having an absolutely wonderful time. I’m teaching speech and accents to the MFA Acting students, and it’s really a dream come true.
Experiencing Accents #20
Experiencing Accents #20 wrapped last Sunday. This six-day Knight-Thompson Speechwork explores the skills of accent acquisition and performance. I had a wonderful time teaching with KTS Co-Director Andrea Caban and with our delightful group of participants. Here our the thumbnails from our session recordings:
December Updates
Two shows I coached had performances in December.
FOOD FOR THE GODS, written and directed by Nehprii Amenii, had three performances at the Connecticut Repertory Theatre, December 11th & 12th. This promenade-style performance piece served as a healing ritual for black men killed by police and other self-appointed law-enforcers over the years. It’s a piece unlike any others I’ve worked on, and I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity. The number of performances was reduced due to issues around COVID.
A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS IN WALES, adapted by Adrian Mitchell and Jeremy Brooks from Dylan Thomas’s short story and directed by Bonnie J. Monte, had performances at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, December 8th-26th. It was a beautiful, heart-warming show with a lovely cast, and it was the first show produced in the Kirby Theatre in two years. It closed early due to issues around COVID.
Lastly, I co-taught the 33rd offering of the Knight-Thompson Speechwork workshop, Experiencing Speech, December 11th-17th. I love teaching this workshop, especially in the December slot. The workshop is always filled with interesting, curious participants who teach me so much. And I had a blast teaching with my KTS colleagues, Andrea Caban and Nathan Crocker. Here’s a screenshot of our recording thumbnails:
September Happenings
A few updates from September! I co-taught the 19th offering of the Knight-Thompson Speechwork (KTS) workshop EXPERIENCING ACCENTS with KTS Co-Director Andrea Caban. See our workshop recording thumbnails below!
I also taught a masterclass on KTS for graduate theatre pedagogy students at Virginia Commonwealth University. Thanks to Karen Kopryanski for the invitation!
Lastly, I coached accents and idiolects for a production of LET ME DOWN EASY by Anna Deveare Smith and directed by Ginny Anderson at Connecticut College in New London.
Oral Posture Intensive
A week ago, I finished co-teaching the first ever Knight-Thompson Speechwork Posture Intensive workshop with KTS Co-Director Andrea Caban. It was a really fun, really granular deep dive into oral (or vocal tract) posture in accent work. These are the thumbnails of our session recordings. What a treat to share virtual space with this group.
Experiencing Accents #18
Today was the last day of the 18th offering of the Knight-Thompson Speechwork workshop, Experiencing Accents. I co-led the workshop with fellow KTS Master Teacher Tyler Seiple — our first time leading a KTS workshop together! We had a wonderful time working on the skills of accent acquisition with a group of very thoughtful and playful participants. Since we’ve started offering workshops online, I’ve enjoyed looking back at the thumbnails of our recordings.
American Association for Anatomy
The American Association for Anatomy recently took note of my new book, Experiencing Speech: A Skills-Based, Panlingual Approach to Actor Training, and invited my co-author Andrea Caban and me to write about the anatomical images that Phil Thompson and Jeff Parker created for it. You can read our blurb here, in their monthly online newsletter.
Experiencing Accents #17
Experiencing Accents #17 wrapped on April 25th. It was truly a delight to lead this Knight-Thompson Speechwork workshop on the skills of accent acquisition with KTS Co-Director Andrea Caban. Looking forward to leading it again with KTS Certified Teacher Tyler Seiple in August. Below are the thumbnails from our session recordings.
Experiencing Speech #30
Last week, I was lucky to co-teach the Knight-Thompson Speechwork workshop Experiencing Speech with KTS Co-Director Andrea Caban. This is the second time we’ve taught this workshop together while writing our book, also titled Experiencing Speech. We had a wonderful group of speechworkers in this thirtieth offering of the workshop. I learn new things each time I teach this workshop. It’s exciting.
Since these workshops have gone online, I've loved looking at our recording thumbnails from each session and reflecting on the journey.
Experiencing Speech (the book)
I’m very excited to share that I have co-written a speech book with fellow Knight-Thompson Speechwork Certified Teachers, Andrea Caban and Jeffrey Parker.
The book is titled Experiencing Speech: A Skills-Based, Panlingual Approach to Actor Training. It’s a beginner’s guide to Knight-Thompson Speechwork and a companion book to Speaking with Skill by KTS Co-Founder Dudley Knight.
The book imagines a one-semester speech class and lays out a progression of experiential exercises that comprise a descriptive approach to speech training and how it connects to other aspects of actor training.
The book will be published May 20, 2021 and is available for pre-order on Routledge’s website, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other places.
Stay tuned for more updates!
Experiencing Speech #28
The 28th offering of the Knight-Thompson Speechwork workshop Experiencing Speech finished last Friday. It was a delight to spend six days on Zoom with my co-teachers Eliza Simpson and Jeremy Sortore and with 26 curious and playful speechworkers. Together we explored vocal anatomy, the physical actions of speech sounds, all of the speech sounds observed in language, descriptive phonetics, and applications to text. Here are just a few moments from our journey:
Accent Webinars
This summer I led a series of Accent Webinars. Recordings of those webinars - along with my written breakdown of the accent’s features and links to samples of native speakers - are available now for purchase for $50 each.
Accent Webinar Packages are available for the following accents:
Afrikaans
Boston
Cockney
Dublin
Estuary
New York City
So-Called General American
Russian
Contact me here to purchase. And stay safe!
Online Summer Workshops
I am offering an 8-week online Introduction to Fitzmaurice Voicework this summer, starting later this month. The class will meet Mondays 1-2:30pm EDT on Zoom. The rate is a sliding scale of $5-$20. Pay what you can within that range, no questions asked.
I am also offering a series of pay-what-you-can online accent workshops. Group accent workshops will meet Tuesdays 1-2pm EDT on Zoom. Accents currently on the schedule are RP, Memphis, Dublin, So-Called General American, NYC, and Russian.
More info and instructions on how to register are here.
Catching Up on the Spring
Since going into quarantine in March, my work - like so much of life - has moved online.
In March and April, my Fitzmaurice Voicework colleague Tuuli Nilsson invited me to teach two online practical lectures on articulation for the second-year acting students at the University of the Arts Helsinki. It was delightful to introduce some Knight-Thompson Speechwork to those students and to get them curious about what they can do with their muscles of articulation to shape sound.
In April, Dr. Masi Asare included me in the second episode of her new podcast, Voicing Across Distance. Each week, she shares a reading on voice, engages in conversation with a voice scholar, and invites a voice coach to share an exercise. I was honored to be asked to share an exercise. You can listen to Episode Two here, and I highly recommend subscribing and listening to all of the episodes.
This past weekend I was invited to remotely attend the Shanghai Theatre Academy’s Forum of Theatre, Film & TV, part of Shanghai University League’s Forum for International Young Scholars. I had the honor of listening to Catherine Fitzmaurice and other theater practitioners and scholars give remarks on the current state of theatre, film, and TV and on how we move forward from here. Much gratitude to Catherine for the invitation.
Finally, I taught the Knight-Thompson Speechwork workshop Experiencing Speech online with KTS Master Teacher Andrea Caban at the end of May. This was the 26th offering of this workshop and only the second time it’s been taught online. We had a wonderful group of participants calling in from all over the U.S., Canada, Ireland, Italy, Czechia, and England. It was truly an enriching experience, and I had a blast teaching with Andrea for the first time!
Here’s a photo from the Shanghai Theatre Academy Forum:
Warm up your articulators without touching your face!
I recorded a warm-up for the muscles of expression and the articulators - that doesn’t require you to touch your face! There are some exercises that require you to touch your neck and the sides of your head. You can skip those if you want to! Much gratitude to my teachers Dudley Knight, Phil Thompson, and Nancy Houfek for these exercises.
Experiencing Speech #25
Last month, I had the opportunity to teach the 25th offering of Experiencing Speech in NYC with two wonderful co-teachers, Nathan Crocker and Dayle Towarnicky. Experiencing Speech is a 6-day Knight-Thompson Speechwork workshop. It lays out a descriptive approach to speech training for actors (or anyone else who uses their voice professionally) that could be applied to any accent of any language. This year, we had 29 participants - the largest group we’ve ever had! We covered the philosophy behind KTS, vocal anatomy, the physical actions of speech sounds, descriptive phonetics, and the skills of adjusting linguistic detail in speech. Teaching these workshops always teaches me, and I’m grateful to everyone who joined us.
Here we are gurning:
VASTA & Experiencing Accents
I’ve spent the past couple of weeks in Orlando and NYC for voice and speech-related events. The Voice and Speech Trainers Association (VASTA) held its annual conference in Orlando in early August, and I co-presented with KTS Teacher Jeremy Sortore a workshop on Knight-Thompson Speechwork’s approach of using oral or vocal tract posture in learning an accent. We found some arbitrary oral postures through gurning and then used some vowel sounds to find our way into the postures of accents that exist in the world. It was great fun, and I always enjoy teaching with Jeremy.
After the VASTA conference, I traveled to New York city to help facilitate the KTS workshop, Experiencing Accents, with KTS Co-Founder Phil Thompson. Experiencing Accents is a six-day workshop on the skills of accent acquisition (including oral posture!), and we had a wonderful group of participants who dove head-first into an empathetic way of listening to and analyzing different accents. Here is a photo of us gurning on the last day of the workshop:
Experiencing Speech
A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of co-teaching Experiencing Speech, the introductory Knight-Thompson Speechwork workshop, in NYC with fellow Certified KTS Teacher Eliza Simpson. We had a wonderful group of actors, teachers, coaches, and otherwise interested folks in the 6-day workshop. In a manner that mirrors language acquisition in humans, we covered anatomy, the physical actions of speech, every speech sound observed in every human language, descriptive phonetics, and the skills of adjusting linguistic detail in speech - all the while being experiential, playful, and rigorous in our exploration.
Here is some of the group at the end of our last day:
And here we are gurning:
And here’s a photo of Eliza and me after we took a journey through the empty consonant chart:
Women-Ar
On October 22nd at 4pm EDT, I’m co-facilitating a free Knight-Thompson Speechwork webinar with Andrea Caban. It’s a webinar for female-identifying members of the voice, speech, and accent world - a webinar to give us space to talk about our collective experiences operating in a male-dominated profession.
You can find more information under the Workshops tab on this website and on the Knight-Thompson Speechwork website.
Join us!
The University of Connecticut
This week, I started a new job as Assistant Professor of Voice and Speech at the University of Connecticut (UConn). I am teaching in the MFA and BFA Acting Programs there, as well as coaching productions at the Connecticut Repertory Theatre. I'm excited to join this wonderful community of artists!