Free Introduction to Knight-Thompson Speechwork

On August 28th at 3pm, I am hosting a free Introduction to Knight-Thompson Speechwork as part of KTS's monthly webinar series.

If you’re curious about KTS, have had a taste of the work and want more, or want to refresh your relationship to it, please join us. I will outline some fundamental principles (perhaps) of this approach to speech and accent training and will lead participants through some introductory exploration of the physical actions of speech sounds. There will be time for questions and answers.

You can register for FREE here.

KTS & FV

Yesterday, I taught in Catherine Fitzmaurice's 6-day workshop in NYC. Each day of this workshop focuses on a different aspect of Fitzmaurice Voicework: destructuring, restructuring, movement, speech, text, and singing. Yesterday was Speech Day. We did some quintessential Knight-Thompson Speechwork play, moving from a physical exploration of the vocal tract to articular isolations to gurning to Omnish. It was a great group!

Experiencing Speech

Before the holiday, I was in NYC for a little more than a week to teach the Knight-Thompson Speechwork workshop, Experiencing Speech, with fellow KTS teacher, Eliza Martin Simpson. Experiencing Speech is the introduction to the KTS approach to teaching speech and accents to actors (or anyone) and covers anatomy, the physical actions of all speech sounds in human language, descriptive phonetics, and the skills of adjusting linguistic detail in speech. We had a wonderful, curious, generous group of participants in this 21st offering of Experiencing Speech. Here we are gurning:

Singapore

In August, I traveled to Singapore - my first time visiting Asia - to attend the annual Voice and Speech Trainers Association (VASTA) conference. I had a wonderful time taking workshops led by voice and storytelling practitioners from Australia, India, Bali, and Mongolia. I co-presented a workshop on linguistic detail in Singlish with fellow Knight Thompson-Speechwork Teacher Jeremy Sortore and native Singaporean and voice coach Petrina Kow. We chose Singlish to explore this core principle of KTS - the principle that advocates teaching speech skills and fluency strategies that might increase or decrease the amount of linguistic detail a speaker uses, rather than teaching a prescriptive pronunciation pattern as a standard. The practices explored in the workshop are part of a larger conversation about the use of the term "formality" in KTS. You can read more of that conversation here, on the KTS blog.

After the VASTA conference, Jeremy Sortore and I co-taught Experiencing Speech: Part One, the introductory Knight-Thompson Speechwork workshop that covers vocal anatomy and the physical actions of all speech sounds in every human language. We had a wonderful group of speech explorers in the workshop. Here we are gurning on our last day together: