Creating Our Aviary: Vocals and Bodywork

When the process started we wanted to make sure it was clear to our audience that the actors they were seeing on stage were pretending to be birds. We wanted the line between human and bird to be very blurred and so we had to do a lot of research into our birds and a lot of work finding ways of amalgamating bird like mannerisms into our voices and bodies.

Elsam suggests that “…an audience may sometimes forgive less-than-brilliant acting, but if you speak too quietly and deny them access to the story, they’ll not forgive that.” (Elsam 2006, p.81), therefore even with the distortions we were considering adding to our performance to extenuate the bird like qualities we wanted the messages we were trying to show to be clear. We wanted the audience to still think about what they were hearing, and be able to gain – even a broad – feel for oppression and the idea of being trapped.

We knew that even when playing a human, in a naturalistic play you have to “…keep your voice interesting by varying the notes” (Elsam 2006, p.84) but we wanted to edit this process to make the performance more absurd. I did a lot of research into vocal performances, as I speak a lot throughout the play I wanted to make sure that my vocal work would have enough range to keep the audience interested. Patsy Rodenburg noted that we “…live in a society which places value on not showing passion or joy in debate or ideas. More and more, the voice’s tendency is to stay trapped in the throat and chest only.” (2002, p.93). The range within speech is so important to get across not only meaning in what the character is saying, but their emotion and subtext. We experimented with a lot of ways of saying particular lines, and it could change the feel of an entire section of the performance. Rodenburg said that “…range can also reflect emotional and intellectual excitement in a speaking voice. If we sound dull it is either because nothing is going on inside us intellectually or emotionally…” (2002, p.96), therefore I made sure that the internal monologue of my character never stopped and throughout the performance I was thinking of ways to escape, and thinking of ways to get the other birds to react to me and to escape with me.

Although this helped greatly and made my speeches a lot more interesting to listen to we still at the beginning wanted more absurdity in the speech patterns for the cast. Elsam notes that “Once you become aware of vocal inflection in speech, you can start to use inflection consciously.” (2006, p.85) We looked at playing with the intonation of words and going up or down with our voices where it didn’t follow the meaning. This also added to the idea of the characters not understanding what they are talking about as they are birds and are merely repeating things they have heard without any real idea of the consequences. For my bird we played around with repetitive sounds such as any time my character says “I” I would repeat it. Although this sounded more like a stutter, which could have suggested nervousness to our audience and we didn’t want this impression of my character. We also looked at making any lists of words, such as “endless, beautiful, complicated, useless…” or “…comfortable, satisfied, non-communicating, slave society…” really fast to imitate the pecking of a woodpecker. However we lost some meaning by doing this, and we also enjoyed the sounds of the words when they were slowed down, and to some lists, such as “delegation, investigation, confrontation” there were pleasant rhymes that we didn’t want to lose.

We then however decided as a contrasting element that my character would have a much more human like speech pattern.  We still worked on keeping my voice interesting, as you hear a lot of it during Cagebirds, but we started to do work more on the emotions behind the speech and the loud and soft tones, than playing too much with an absurd way of speaking. One of the main pieces of feedback I received during the process was to “go for it” and exaggerate what we were doing, this worked fantastically in rehearsals, and helped with a lot of other blocking once we saw how the other actors would react to my speeches when they were exaggerated. Rodenburg notes that “The other potential hindrance to the range of the voice is the speaker’s fear of being ‘over the top’, or sounding too committed to the text… And range is vocal colour.” (2002, p.97) I definitely felt this worry at first and, as Rodenburg put it, I had to “…not let the voice of restraint whisper in [my] ear to stop [my] vocal experimentation.” (2002, p.98) but once we saw the reaction from other members of the group this was a lot easier to achieve. We worked with the soft speeches being almost whispered and the angrier speeches being bellowed into the faces of the others actors, this process meant we were able to scale my performance to the level we (‘we’ being the director, assistant director and myself) wanted it once we had produced the right level of reaction from the actors.

When we were working on bodywork, this again started a lot more birdlike and then progressed into something more human. When researching woodpeckers there were many videos with the pecking movements and when they actually moved position it was always with sharp fast movements, with twitching of the head and flitting from place to place.

We looked at the tension in bodies and ways of moving that didn’t feel natural to us at first, I found that Elsam defines the physical attributes that create a personality “…are tension, height, openness, space (or rather use of space) and eye contact…” (2006, p.45). I then looked at each of these in relation to my character, and found a way of holding myself and moving that was indicative of a woodpecker. I worked on holding the tension in my shoulder back so that my chest was exposed and moving my neck with my eyes as they moved, rather than smooth movements. I also spent the entire performance on tip toes giving my legs tension and a fidgety urgent energy to my movements, and a sense of height, and a suggestion of self importance. The use of space was also an interesting variant within my character compared to the other birds, I needed to use a lot more of the space than they did and I needed to behave as if the space was a new and foreign environment but still command it in a confident way.

 

Works Cited:

Elsam, Paul (2006) Acting Characters, A & C Black Publishers Limited: London

Rodenburg, Patsy (2002) The Actor Speaks: Voice and the Performer, Palgrave MacMillian