Week 9

This week was a step forward from the rest, having taken into account everything we have learnt in the past 8 weeks, we had to step on our own 2 feet and try things without guidance as such. We were told to find a space in the room and carry out our own voice warm up. Starting with stretches I did the sun salute twice over to stretch both sides of the body evenly, I had a few glitches having been put on the spot and forgot what stretch to do next but I got there in the end.

Moving on I began to do the lazy days exercise, starting to focus on breathing to get it steady at a consistent pace, once I was happy having focused on the breath and relaxing my muscles I moved on to using my voice, starting with the ‘f’s and v’s, moving on to the hums and ‘mah’s I built up using my voice to warm up my voice efficiently. From the lazy days I went into the prayer position to repeat the voice warm up before crouching with my hands on the floor to do it one final time. After that admittedly I completely forgot what next, and as instructed afterwards, I would move on to repeat the voice arm ups to the wall and then project out into an open space.

After the warm up, going round the group we each took in turn to read aloud our speech to an audience for the first time given that our ‘performance’ is in 2 weeks. When I read aloud I was aware that I was speaking too fast, to begin with that was the nerves but towards the end of the speech particularly, it was evident that I had worked on that far less than the beginning of the speech so I know what to focus on over the next few weeks. I was told that I had good articulation and pronunciation and I could connect well with the argument presented, but I needed to slow down my pace to get the point across. Additionally, it was evident that I was less confident with the speech as a whole and I needed to be more confident with what I was saying to be able to look up and connect with my peers to get my argument across so learning the script would be beneficial for me.