3/25/10

Thursday, March 25

VOICE
Even more Irish dialect notes... Are you ready?

a. -ing spellings end up sounding like "-un"
b. The unstressed syllables in words like "cabbage", "laughing", "demanded", and the word "it" in unstressed positions, end up having a schwa (uh) vowel.
c. The word "any" (and it's deriviatives, e.g. "anything" and "anyone") is pronounced with the vowel of apple (so it sounds more like "Annie" than "any").
d. Words spelled with "-ow" in unstressed positions (e.g. "yellow", "pillow", "window", "fellow", etc.) shift to a schwa (uh).
e. In CASUAL speech, in UNSTRESSED positions, the word "my" sounds like "me".
f. Sometimes, words like "look", "book", "shook", etc. are said with a vowel closer to the vowel in "moo" than the vowel in "good".
g. One-off pronunciations include film (fil-um), tea (tay), decent (day-sunt), peacock (pay-cock), Jesus -- when used as an oath (Jay-zus), old (owl-d), idiot (ih-jut).
h. In working class dialects, medial and final "t" sounds like "d" (like in "writer" and "sitting").
i. (OPTIONAL) Long, close vowels become two syllables. (So "clean" sounds like "klee-un")
j. (OPTIONAL) Dublin working class dialects are often heavily nasalized.\



MOVEMENT
We started working with Laban elements with our characters. This means that with movement qualities you try to determine if the character is:

direct/indirect
heavy/light
sudden/sustained
bound/free

By my math, there are 16 possible combinations. Eight of these are ones that come up often and that we have names for.

I showed my walk/sitting/lying down/essential gesture for Alma from The Eccentricities of a Nightingale. I decided to go with what I feel she is at the beginning of the play. Fast inner tempo, indirect, medium lightness, sudden, bound. It seemed to go well.


ACTING
Table-working scenes.

I am also now doing a scene with Newbie from Twelfth Night. She is Olivia, and I am Viola (dressed as Cesario).

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