This 5-day course will include instruction in--

Text Interpretation:

This theme will echo throughout the course.  Participants will be given text, from prose, modern verse and classical verse.  The focus will be on finding the active images in the text that need to be conveyed if the meaning is to come across to the listener.  Techniques shared in this session include; paraphrasing and note taking, cold reading and the basic acting questions of who, wha, where, and when as applied to the text at hand.

Forensic Speech Techniques:

Throughout the course we will be teaching and utilizing techniques and methods mined from competive oral interpretation and Forensics. These techniques will help our participants hone their skills in several areas including cutting and adapting literature for performance, writing and adapting ones own material for performance, using physical scripts during performance and a host of other methods designed to improve and enhance our participants overall performance skills.            

Vocal Projection:

Every time you get up in front of a group of people to speak your first task is to be heard.

Participants in “Write Out Loud” will work daily with vocal projection techniques and exercises used worldwide by professional actors and orators.  The instructors will use a variety of techniques, from physical warm-ups, to resonator activation to outdoor speaking to get the most out of your human instrument.

Body Work:

Every day we will use professional actor’s warm-up techniques to get the juices flowing and to loosen up your natural ability to communicate.  With the loosening and exercising of the muscles and the breathing passage, the voice is strengthened.  With the flexing of the muscles we don’t daily use we will open up subtle and unseen possibilities in the use of the physical instrument when applied to live performance.

Cold Reading:

This important aspect of public speaking is touched on during the text interpretation session and fully explored in it’s own intensive workshop.  In this session students will be provided with a variety of texts with little to no time to prepare.  They must then offer the most direct and compelling performance of the text as possible, on the spot.  Instruction will involve speed reading, reading ahead, reading at a pace, maintaining eye contact and, of course, breathing.

Classical Verse:

There is nothing harder for the contemporary orator than to come across truthfully and organically when reciting or acting a classical poem or a passage from the classical age.  Bob and Hank will share a variety of techniques used by actors and Language Arts professionals alike to decipher dense, archaic poetry from the age of poetic one-upmanship.  Not only do you need to understand it before you can recite it, you need to communicate that meaning, often in meter, to an audience.  This is session echoes the reasons Inverse Theater started the Verse Circus in the first place.

Modern Verse, Prose and Short Stories:

Continuing with the Classical Verse them we expand in to the realm of performing the work of the contemporary writer and poet.  We will work with a mix of modern material; from the Avant-Garde poetry to the short-story narrative.  This session builds on techniques developed in all of the earlier workshops and delves in to the two main extremes of interpreting modern text…Either not sounding like you are acting or reciting at all or creating a small piece of theater out of your text and acting the hell out of it.

Musical Interpretation:

No we don’t mean to have you sing “Oklahoma” (unless that’s your thing, of course).  This session has no limits and there is no “technique”.  You simply take text and apply music.  Collaborations, solo performances, guitar, Boom-box, tuba, digeridoo; whatever you feel, just communicate the meaning of your text with the aid of tone.  Participants are their own directors, Musical Directors and lead performers.