Voicing Concern

Day two. Voice class with Cynthia, who was the highlight of Course One. Cynthia is a luvvie of the old school, where everything is fantastic and everyone is darling. From the little I have seen of her work, she's an excellent director, but today her role is to take us for voice class. It's a three hour session and she happily talks for half an hour at a time, in a rambling conversation that explains little but keeps asking us whether we have understood.

The key points she wants to get across are diaphragm (see above) and larynx (see below), but instead of clearly telling us that the former is the large muscle that few of us are aware of that stretches across the middle of the body separating the lungs and heart from the digestive organs below, and the larynx is the Adam's apple (which even women have), she wanders around the subject and lets each of us filter out the appropriate information as best we can.

I'd like to interrupt, to take the knowledge I learnt in Linguistics a generation ago, to suggest that everyone put their fingers on their throat to make the sounds "f" and "v", "s" and "z" to learn what the larnx does. I'd add on a vowel, both spoken and whispered, to underline the point, but I keep silent and the class lumbers on.

Half an hour or more is spent in half-heartedly doing games that either repeat yesterday's Movement work with Ann or have more in common with physical expression than with sound. And the final session is taken up with a lengthy and unclear introduction to Waiting for Godot, which explains nothing to those youngsters who have not heard of the play. Which means that we only have a few last minutes, for couples - I am paired with drama teacher Matt, who is pleasant and more intelligent than first appears, and who shares my concern with Cynthia's wandering style - to engage in rapid-fire Vladimir and Estragon exchanges. Just as we are getting into it, it's time to go home...