CERTIFICATION!!

This is just a short post to say 'Welcome!" to our first-ever certification group.

It was fourteen years ago that I joined the first Fitzmaurice Voicework Certification class. It seems impossibly long ago, and yet I remember the people, and the feeling of palpable anticipation so vividly. Dudley taught the Speech sequence and introduced the idea of Omnish in what must have been one of its earliest iterations. I completely misunderstood the assignment, and went home and wrote out in detailed phonetic transcription my Omnish oration. Fortunately, I quickly realized that I had made a misstep and quietly shoved my script into my pocket.

Since that time I have learned so much and traded so many ideas back and forth with Dudley, and with the students of these workshops, that I feel like an entirely different person. I hope that these three weeks will teach me yet again how small my frame of reference was.

I went looking for a picture to represent this post, and I found this:

H Stanley Thompson teaching residents 1968

My father, posing for a serious picture with his Ophthalmology residents. I expect our certificants to study the residents' expressions, and work it into their gurn rotation.

We will be using this blog for the next three weeks to carry our conversation beyond the walls of the Chelsea Studios. All are welcome to join the discussions, but if you choose to lurk, you can expect to read the comments of nine, very clever, very engaged students, tackling the ideas that Dudley and I set out.

I can't wait to start!