On the 6th September this year, I will be presenting a workshop for this year’s PEVoC in Santander, Spain.

Many teachers, especially those running private studios, are teaching genres outside of their original specialism (LoVetri & Means Weekly, 2003; Bartlett, 2010; Edwards & Meyer, 2014; Fahey, 2021). It can be difficult for performers to unite the Musical Theatre disciplines, which should be more than a patchwork of the three disciplines, but a synergistic unification (Cuny, 2022). Singing teachers may not always feel well equipped to teach all of the performance skills required to help a student with Acting Through Song (Cuny, 2018) and all teachers should understand the performance needs of their client (Edwards & Hoch, 2018).

This workshop will present a number of teaching tools from a text-focused approach to help singing teachers from non-theatre backgrounds with their approach to Acting Through Song. The delegates will be led though a series of techniques that they can test out for themselves during the session. Attention will be placed on harvesting more information from the song lyric to reveal the intention of the character and to build detail and texture.

Recognised methods such as monologuing the lyric (Streeton & Raymond, 2014), text analysis as poetry (Oswald, 2005) and focus on meaningful punctuation (Moore & Bergman, 2016) will be explored. I will also cover a little element of using emotion in the vowels. Emotion is more recognisable in some vowels than others (Waaramaa, Laukkannen, Paavo and Eero, 2008). The phrase particularly used in this workshop uses an ‘e’ [i:] vowel predominantly. ‘E’ [i:] has a high, bright quality with formants 2-4 being relatively high, making it useful for a song conveying joy (Waaramaa, Laukkannen, Paavo and Eero, 2008). However, despite this, research suggests sadness can also be identified clearly in the [i:] vowel (Waaramaa, Laukkannen, Paavo and Eero, 2008). I would suggest this connects more to the sense of longing or keening, perhaps. In this section of the song, the character is afraid, sad and longing. This could probably also be connected to some affect bursts (involuntary non-verbal sounds) like the long ‘ee’ sound some cultures might make in response to a negative situation. A smiling position of the mouth is associated with brightening the vowel and a positive valence of the vowel [i:], (Rummer and Schweppe, 2019). Therefore, I suggest that the [i:] in this extract be performed with a relaxed mouth rather than a spread lip position.

This will be followed by a new method developed by me, which places emphasis on the active verbs, following in the tradition of the likes of Stanilavsky with his Method of Physical Actions and Stafford Clark and Gaskill with Actioning, but created specifically for Musical Theatre singers. Practitioners have recommended paying attention to stressed or operative words (Ostwald, 2005; Melton & Tom, 2012), but how these words should be treated is rarely discussed. This workshop will present a method of working with Musical Theatre singers using operative words to help avoid generalised emotion and to keep the performance alive and present.

The research for this workshop was borne out of my work as a voice, audition and singing coach privately and at three drama schools (Cygnet Training Theatre, Italia Conti and Guildford School of Acting) over the last fifteen years, as well as my research as a master’s student with the Voice Study Centre. The focus on text stems from my undergraduate degree in English and Literary Studies and my diploma in Acting with Directing. I am now studying for a PhD in Theatre with Guildford School of Acting (University of Surrey), which is a development of my master’s research on performance of emotion and the teaching of Acting Through Song in Musical Theatre institutions. This workshop will allow me to present a small element of the culmination of this work and to receive wider feedback on its value.