Annunciation Exercises

Today we prepared ourselves more to our Commedia Dell’ Arte Performance. We did annunciation exercises, so we will be able to speak with more diction, and produce a loud, clear voice.

Steve asked us to stand in a circle. He said that there are curtain exercises that we should do to learn how to control our voice and annunciation, and especially how to pronounce specific sounds. Because we all have different accents and English is not everyone’s first language, it is important for us to practice the way we speak.
Steve demonstrated us couple of exercises:

1) “MMMMmmmm” – in this exercise, we all stand in a circle, breath very deeply through the mouth and make a loud ‘Mmmm’ sound. The sound has to come out through the stomach, for two reasons:
a) It makes a louder sound
b) If you won’t, it might hurt your throat and damage it

The exercise continues when you add different sounds to it. For example, you add “Maa”, “Muu” and “Mii”. In the same time you have to exaggerate the movement of your mouth and open in as much as possible, because on stage your movements have to be more exaggerated than usual.

2) "Pe-Tze-Ke" – in this exercise, Steve asked us to stand in a circle and make the sounds Pe-Tze-Ke in a much exaggerated way, until we even twist our faces. In the beginning, we said every sound once, alone, and in the end we said them all very fast.

Later on, when I talked to my classmate Lynn, she told me that she thought about me during the exercises because she doesn’t think that I speak clear enough. I asked Steve for more exercises, and I also talked to my friend from home who gave me an exercise.

Steve’s advice was to write my name with my tongue on the palate and that will make me more aware of the way I speak. My friend told me to put a cork between my teeth, speak slowly to someone and see if he can understand me. I decided to use these exercises before my performances and hopefully it will help me to improve my annunciation.

I found it very useful because I do have a problem with my annunciation and people frequently tell me that I do not speak clearly and too fast. These exercises made me be aware of myself speaking, and the way I explain things. I realize that sometimes I am getting nervous when I speak in English, as it is not my first language, and therefore I speak very fast and ‘choke on my words’.

I think it is very important for actors to be aware of it. First of all, because your performance is always improved when the audience doesn’t need to ‘concentrate’ to understand you, and can actually concentrate on the story and on your act. Second, when we speak clearly it shows the audience that we feel comfortable with our characters and we don’t only ‘recite the lines’ and try to finish our part as fast as we can.