What is Fitzmaurice Voicework?
Fitzmaurice Voicework is a comprehensive approach to voice training that explores the dynamics between body, breath, voice, the imagination, language, and presence. It encourages vibrant voices that communicate intention and feeling without excess effort, and brings together physical experience and mental focus.
Destructuring, the first phase of the work, promotes awareness of the body, spontaneous and free breathing, and vocal expressivity, through Tremorwork™ and hands-on interventions. Restructuring, the second phase, encourages economy of effort while speaking or performing. The resulting freedom and focus allow for a wide range of vocal expression without strain.
The basic process of Destructuring involves putting yourself into a physical position in which your body will begin to tremor, and then inviting your experience, your breath, and your voice to unfold spontaneously. As you do this, parts of your body that have been chronically held begin to release, and your breathing begins to open in places where it has been inflexible. This results in a great deal of unaccustomed energy, waves of tremor, and ultimately relaxation, flowing throughout the body, sensitizing it to vibration, and increasing feeling and awareness. As this unnecessary physical tension is released, so too are the emotions and imagination that have been locked into the tension.
We often control our breathing to reduce the impact of difficult feelings and experiences. For performers, this creates problems when it becomes habitual, when it becomes an instant unconscious response to stress of all kinds. Over time whole parts of our bodies, our imaginations, our emotional lives – in short, our experience – can become unconsciously locked and so no longer available to enrich and inform the life of the characters we portray: it is very hard to express vocally what you cannot experience. Destructuring is about uncovering that experience, about consciously releasing the breath and voice. In that sense it is also about uncovering a greater sense of wholeness in the performer, of opening to the full spectrum of experience and expression.
Restructuring is, as the name suggests, the process of re-integrating the freedom of breath and impulse gained through Destructuring into speech and text. Where Destructuring is often loose and “follow your impulses”, Restructuring is technical and very specific; where Destructuring throws the actor into chaos, Restructuring returns to her a form and structure, allowing her to communicate simply and efficiently with her voice. This structured breath is not something foreign or unusual – it is how the body naturally communicates when it is speaking from its own need and imagination.
Since the physical and emotional aspects and the awareness levels of the actor can be deeply affected by this work, the resulting growth of the personality helps create a more mature artist, with increased potential for both sensitivity and pro-action. It is a holistic approach to the human voice, and produces more centered, more grounded, and more vibrant actors.
Fitzmaurice Voicework is taught at Yale School of Drama, Harvard University/American Repertory Theatre's Institute for Advanced Theatre Training, the University of California-Irvine, Atlantic Acting Conservatory, in studios for New York University's undergraduate drama program, and numerous other institutions and theatres in the United States and abroad.
For more information about Fitzmaurice Voicework, please visit the website of its founder, Catherine Fitzmaurice, where you will find links to several articles explaining more about this incredible work.