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A Little Louder in the Back

Teaching Your Actors How To Project 

By Christina Hamlett 

Former actress and director Christina Hamlett is an award-winning author whose credits to date include 52 books, 278 stage plays and squillions of articles on the performing arts.  www.authorhamlett.com. 

“Speak up, people!  I can’t hear you!”

Decades later, I can still hear the strident voice of director Elissa Sharee at the back of the house during rehearsals.  On one occasion, I remember she swanned out the doors and into the lobby.  Were we supposed to stop rehearsing until she came back or was she just messing with us?  It didn’t take long for us to get the answer.  “I can’t hear you!”  she declared, even though she was nowhere in sight.  For a tiny, birdlike woman, her voice had the capacity to go the distance.  And that’s what she wanted all of us to learn.

Projection is not about yelling.  We all have the physical capacity to yell when the occasion warrants it (i.e., a sporting event, heated argument, trying to get someone’s attention across the room, etc.).  Yelling, however, isn’t appropriate for an intimate moment onstage.  It’s your diaphragm and not your vocal chords which enable you to effortlessly project your voice and use normal air to create the amount of volume and depth you need to fill a theatre space.  Yelling comes out flat with a higher pitch; projection is a deeper and more rounded, complex sound.

Warming up

Proper warm-up is key to maximizing your ability to project.  Here are some warm-up exercises to try:

• The easiest exercise and one used by opera singers is the “Ha!”  Take a deep breath to fill your lungs to capacity and then force all the air out with a single “ha!”  (Think of a cat hacking up a fur ball.)  Practice this multiple times as loudly as you can to see how far you can throw the sound.
  
  
• Yawn with your mouth closed.  This will make your jaw more limber and relieve tension.
  
  
• Stretch your arms to the ceiling and then side to side.  An aggressive torso stretch will strengthen your core and help you to better project.  Incorporate leg lifts, planks, and crunches into your exercise routine, again to strengthen your core and diaphragm.
  
  
• Lip bubbles (also known as lip trills) can improve your breath control along with warming your diaphragm.  Simply purse your mouth into a loose pucker, take a deep breath, and allow your lips to flap as you exhale.  Make this motorboat blubber for as long as you can on a single breath.
  
  
• Even if you’re not in a musical, doing ascending and descending vocal scales will stretch your range, plus push you out of your comfort zone.  If you don’t feel comfortable singing notes, try humming instead as loudly as you can.
  
  

Blocking

While blocking is crucial in giving actors a roadmap on how to move when delivering lines, it can also impede the challenge of teaching them how to project.  Specifically, if they are standing only three feet away from a scene partner, there’s a tendency to talk in a normal voice rather than appreciating this conversation needs to be comfortably “overheard” by everyone in the audience.

Once your actors have mastered their lines and movement, have them stand twice or even three times the distance from one another as a warm-up exercise.  If you like, you can even have them stand in the wings or in different locations in the house.  Yet another technique is to have your actors turn their backs on the audience and deliver all of their lines upstage.  Can students/volunteers seated throughout the house still hear every line clearly?

Ensure your actors are practicing good posture, too.  When shoulders are back — whether standing or sitting — it allows for maximum air intake and correct diaphragmatic breathing.  No slouching, even when standing around and waiting for a scene!

Breathing control, diction, and resonance

An individual exercise is to have actors stand close to a wall and speak a line which requires a full breath.  There should be a slight echo.  Once they figure out how much air is needed to speak at that volume, have them move farther away from the wall and repeat.  Another useful exercise to strengthen the core is to string as many lines as possible into one continuous monologue and practice delivering it in one extended breath.  Yet another is to recite the Gettysburg Address.  It is only 10 sentences (the longest sentence being the last) and took Abe about two minutes.

It’s important for your actors to note that if their chests and shoulders rise when they inhale, they’re breathing using just their lungs which subsequently inhibits projection.  Have them put their hands on their stomachs and feel them expand, filling the abdominal cavity with air instead.

Emphasize proper diction and articulation.  Not only will this reduce strain on the vocal chords, but it will also increase breath control and facilitate projecting the voice with power and clarity.  Have your actors sing and sustain single vowels (A, E, I, O, U) on one breath.  Do the same with individual consonants (which is actually much harder).

Incorporate tongue twisters in your vocal warm-ups.  Here are a few to use:

• She sells seashells by the seashore,
  The seashells she sells, are seashells I’m sure.
  
  
• Which wristwatches are Swiss wristwatches?
  
  
• Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager managing an imaginary menagerie.
  
  
• The sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick.
  
  
• The thirty-three thieves thought that they thrilled the throne throughout Thursday.

For vocal variety, repeat each one in a high pitch, a normal pitch, and a low pitch.

Lastly, have your actors practice their lines in environments with ambient noise.  This doesn’t just help them with focus but will also challenge them to adapt their projection to different settings and interferences.