Getting Your Message Across:
Speaking Effectively About Your Art
When
artists speak to the public, whether to gallery owners, managers, clients, patrons or donors, they are
often at a loss to describe the deeply personal act of making art.
This workshop is designed to help artists articulate their process, vision, or meaning of what they are making.
The primary focus is to clarify the stories behind the creation of the work and learn to express them
eloquently, succinctly and colorfully to viewers or potential clients.
Topics include connection to audience, physical and vocal use, body language, purpose and tactics, as well
as story-telling techniques.
The goal is to prepare artists to give their viewers an insight into how art is made, to bring their works
of art to life in a new way, and to convey their personal creative process to the people who support them.Shakespeare in Performance: The Physical Experience
The creative artist functions best balanced on the cusp between right and left-brain existence.
By using a physical approach to Shakespeare’s texts, this workshop deepens the actor’s use of the language
as a visceral experience grounded in an intellectually challenging form.
We will examine the rhythm and meter of the text through movement and its effect on the emotional life of
the performer; “sound clusters” as physical experience of vibration with weight, space and time qualities;
and language structure and rhetoric as variations of movement forms.
Shakespeare’s language will come alive!
Production Coaching
Coaching of individual actors or groups of actors in vocal health, vocal use (breath support, ease, variety),
use of complex text (structure, clarity and meaning), articulation and clarity, dialect acquisition or
elimination, projection, choral speaking, adaptation to theater space and technology demands, all in service
of the director’s vision.
Individual Coaching
Topics may include techniques for volume, variety and clarity of vocal expression; dialect acquisition or
elimination; text analysis and use; on camera or on air performance (language use, personality, clarity);
preparation for auditions.
| © 2013-2014 Nancy Houfek |