Mackenzie Larsen and Professor Stephanie Breinholt, Theatre and Media Arts

The purpose of my Orca project was to learn more about Fitzmaurice Voice technique directly from Katherine Fitzmaurice at one of her workshops in New York and use the techniques I learned to team-teach a Voice and Diction class for the Theatre and Media Arts Department. I also helped collect dialect samplings for a book Stephanie Breinholt will be writing about dialects for the stage.

To help prepare for this project, I took the existing Voice and Diction class and was a teaching assistant for the class for a year where I learned basic Fitzmaurice and Linklater voice techniques. These techniques taught me how to release tension in my body to produce a clear and healthy sound. In New York, I expanded my understanding of Fitzmaurice Voice technique. Katherine Fitzmaurice’s Voicework focuses on breathing, beginning with deconstruction exercises called tremors. We learned several tremors at the workshop. In order to do a tremor, I would go into a specific position – like in yoga – and then stretch to a point where my body’s muscles were caught between contracting and relaxing, which caused whichever area of my body that was being stretched to tremor, or shake. While doing the tremor, I was supposed to maintain steady breathing. As the class becomes accustomed to tremors and breathing, text was added. We would recite a monologue while doing a tremor in order to train our bodies to use free and spontaneous breath as we spoke. Eventually we stood up, walked around, and recited a monologue free of tension with a produced and clear sound.

I had learned many of the tremors we did in New York while taking my Voice and Diction class at BYU, but I did some new tremors and modifications to some I already knew. One new tremor I learned was a standing tremor. The body is in standing position with the feet pointed in. The hips are pushed forward so that the torso has to hang backward a bit. The hands are held together above the head, which is looking up. Eventually the balance between relaxation in the hips and pushing them forward in contraction causes the body to tremor in an upright position. I learned modifications for tremors such as the plow and the side twist, both of which require the feet to be flexed. Before I went to the workshop I hadn’t paid much attention to the way I flexed my feet, but while I was in the workshop Katherine Fitzmaurice pointed out that if we flexed our feet thinking about extending a straight line though our ankles rather than allowing them to sickle in, like in ballet, we would get a better stretch.

Fitzmaurice voice work also incorporates focus-line and room-awareness. Learning focus-line included focusing on a specific point on an opposite wall, preparing to produce sound through breath, and then sending my sound to that specific point on the wall along my “focus-line.”

To learn room-awareness, the class started our various monologues while sitting down and when we wanted to we could stand up and move around the room, being aware of where we were stepping and the people we were near. We were supposed to keep track of how the room and our surroundings affected our breathing as well as our production. Fitzmaurice Voicework encourages connection to space in order to produce a healthy, connected, and tension-free sound.

One of the most effective and rewarding days of the Fitzmaurice workshop was the day we worked on singing. The class gathered in a studio at the beginning of the day and did a tremor series with the singing teacher, who was a qualified Fitzmaurice teacher. When we were done, various members of the class volunteered to go up in front of the class, sing 16 bars of a song, and then work through those 16 bars using Fitzmaurice voice techniques. People were encouraged to engage spontaneous breath in their piece, even breathing in the middle of a word, to free up tension and get a clearer sound. Some would do tremors, some would use focus-line, all ended up with a drastically clearer, freer, and healthier sound.

When I returned to BYU as a team-teacher for the Voice and Diction class, I was able to teach tremors confidently. I could show the students exactly what I they needed to do, and I had learned specific modifications to achieve better tremors, such as proper foot flexing. When I worked with students on their monologues in class, I knew which tremor they should do to release the tension they had and engage proper breathing. I could also teach focus-line with clearer descriptions. I was able to apply Fitzmaurice work as a teacher to produce a clear voice while teaching so that students could hear an example of the desired effect of Fitzmaurice work.

While in New York, I collected dialects for our teacher, Stephanie Breinholt, who is writing a dialect book. I took a Dialects class at BYU from Stephanie Breinholt, where I learned to speak in various European dialects using the International Phonetic Alphabet. When we got to New York, a fellow student and I walked around various parts of the city, asked people if they would be willing to be recorded while reading a Shakespeare sonnet, and if they said yes, we would record them. We also had them sign a waiver, saying that they understood their voice was being recorded, and no other information was being collected from them. Having learned dialects from BYU’s stage dialect class made me more aware of the various dialects I heard in New York – I could pinpoint specific phonetic and placement changes in their dialect. When we had collected all of our recordings, we sent them to our professor, Stephanie Breinholt, so that she could listen and transpose their dialect phonetically to help her write an updated dialect book.

When I returned to school I was a teaching assistant for the Dialects class at BYU. Having gone to New York and listened to a wide range of American dialects, which are harder to hear for an American, due to their sometimes subtle nature, I was able to hear the subtle changes that needed to be made in various dialects we learned in the class, and help students create proper sounds and find correct placement to produce a proper dialect.