CERTIFICATION CLASS of 2012

Today we celebrate the hardy souls that have completed the first-ever Knight-Thompson Speechwork Certification Course. Those of you who have done a six-day workshop can, perhaps,  imagine the kind of focus and stamina it took to keep at it for three weeks. Please join us in congratulating them on their hard work!

Dudley & Phil

Andrea Caban  Now based in Southern California, Andrea is an actor, writer, producer, private voice and speech coach, and a New York Innovative Theatre award-winning solo artist. She has performed her solos shows regionally and abroad (at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Intimate Theater in Cape Town, Boise Contemporary Theater and New York’s P.S. 122, among others). Andrea is the dialect expert on HowCast.com.

	Julie Foh  holds an MFA in Voice and Speech from A.R.T.’s Institute for Advanced Theatre Training and teaches voice, speech, and accents at Rutgers.  Coaching credits include Cardenio and Ajax in Iraq (A.R.T.); Nightlands (New Georges); Miss Lilly Gets Boned (Studio 42).  She is an Associate Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework®.
	Adrianne Moore  is a freelance director and dialect coach and an associate professor of voice and speech at Utah State University. She is the resident dialect coach for the Salt Lake Acting Company. Other voice and dialect coaching credits include productions for Pioneer Theatre Company, Utah Contemporary Theatre, Utah Festival Opera, Old Lyric Repertory Company and for the film The Saving of Sarah Cain.
	Joseph Papke is a professional actor, speech/text coach, and theater educator in Minneapolis, MN.  He has worked for the Guthrie Theater, Park Square Theatre, Penumbra Theatre, the University of Minnesota, the University of St. Thomas, and St. Olaf College, among others.  He earned his MFA from The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Academy for Classical Acting and is a proud member of Actors' Equity.  www.josephpapke.com
	Rockford Sansom Freelance coach based in NYC. Performer: Broadway tours of 42nd Street (Asia), Wonderful Town (First National), among others. Coached and performed: Off-Broadway and regionally. Teaching: Seoul National, Shanghai Conservatory, Saint Leo, among others. He has trained in Fitzmaurice and Estill voice certification programs. Education: PhD, Capella; MFA, Central Florida
	Erik Singer  teaches voice, speech, accents, and text. He has played leading roles Off-Broadway and at many major regional theatres, and voiced numerous commercials, documentaries, animated shows, and audiobooks.  He is an Associate Editor for the Voice and Speech Review.  MFA: Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art; BA: Yale University.
	Marina Tyndall  is a freelance Dialect Coach based in London. She works as faculty Dialect Coach to BFA Acting students from Rutgers University Mason Gross at Shakespeare’s Globe Education and is a visiting lecturer in Speech, Accents and Phonetics at Central School of Speech and Drama.
	Bernard Vash Flying Actor Studio, with James Donlon and Leonard Pitt.13 years with the American Conservatory Theatre. Edith Skinner, Anne Lawder, Timothy Monich.  Linklater Voice: 2009 observed Kristin Linklater at Columbia University. FitzmauriceVoice Teacher Certification Program. Dialect Coach: Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Teacher: Temple University, San Francisco State University.
	Shannon Vickers  is an Assistant Professor at the University of Winnipeg. She has coached professionally for Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, zone41 theatre, Prairie Theatre Exchange, Theatre Projects Manitoba, Shakespeare in the Ruins, The Citadel Theatre (Banff), and Canadian Stage. Shannon earned an MFA in Theatre Voice Pedagogy at the University of Alberta.

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!

General American Revisited

George C. Scott in Patton



I want to share with you a short series of long e-mails between Erik Singer and me on the subject of how to deal with the desire of students to learn some form of "General American." Erik began the discussion with a thoughtful and thought-provoking e-mail to Phil and me, from which he has given me permission to quote at lengtth:

I've been having an interesting year, and wanted to share some thoughts with you. Should either of you have the time and inclination to respond, it goes without saying that I would be fascinated to hear your thoughts in return.

Welcome to me

I have joined Phil as an author of this blog. All that is lacking is any sense of what I want to say. Stay tuned.
Dudley  *

Where to start?

Stephanie Philo as Titus Andronicus - 2008       photo by Paul Kennedy

"What fool hath added water to the sea?"

-Titus Andronicus

The prospect of launching a blog, of adding a few drops of virtual ink to the ocean of words, is daunting.There are wonderful blogs about speech and phonetics, about accents, and acting, and a whole range of interesting topics, outside of this narrow range of specialization. So why would Dudley and I want to put our oar in?

It is true that both of us have been known to have opinions, and we hope to use this blog as a platform for espousing those views. But far more important than the using this as a megaphone for our own opinions, we feel that this little corner- this sheltered bay of the internet ocean, could be a place where the growing community of people who have encountered our work can ask us questions, point us toward interesting information, and talk through the ramifications of this work, both practical and philosophical, as we put it into practice as teachers, coaches, and performers.

This has been our approach from the beginning, as full of words as we sometimes find our minds and our mouths, we are deeply curious about how our students engage with the work. The work is about experience and experimentation, and we want to open up the conversation to everyone who has a stake in it.

We have a workshop coming up quite soon, followed by our first ever certification, and our plan is to use this blog as a forum for those in our workshops to carry on the conversation outside of the confines of the Chelsea Studios. There is a great deal I don't know about how to run a blog, and I expect to learn a great deal as we go forward. I'll be following up this post with another on the topic of blog policies. Please visit often and  lend your voice to the conversation.

Thanks

Phil Thompson