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One of the things I love about teaching actors is that I get to interact with young people in what, for many, will be one of the most creative phases of their lives. It may not be apparent from inside the experience, but four years of theatrical immersion is an immense luxury and privilege, and […]

When I was in music school, “vocal pedagogy” was largely framed as content knowledge, and always about singing: physiology, acoustics, phonetics, and the like. There’s a lot to know about the mechanisms and processes of voice, so it makes sense to spend some time learning about them. Even later in an MFA program devoted to

For a little fun, here is a YouTube playlist of clips spanning sixty years of Star Trek.  Star Trek takes place in a space-faring future, so it’s a good place to look for clues about how industry storytellers might use speech choices to appeal to a mainstream audience without suggesting a specific real-life setting. What

Over the weekend, UM performance faculty finished our fourth and final full day of BFA Acting program callbacks. We saw 122 students total, after narrowing the field from around 430 initial video applicants. That’s a lot of students! It’s difficult to maintain focus seeing so many auditioners, and after a while there’s the danger that

Actors in training take courses in voice, movement, and acting, and it’s all too easy to conceptualize these classes into two buckets: “acting” and “the courses that don’t have ‘acting’ in the title.” Often, student actors think of movement and voice as ancillary skills that, at best, support their acting. My take is that, while

The following is an expanded version of my remarks for the 2024 VASTA @ ATHE conference panel “Balancing Learning and Re-envisioning Assessment within Academia.” Background First, some ungrading basics that I’ve spoken on previously but bear repeating: These grading basics lead to some implicit messages about the craft of acting. Stated this way, they seem

The following is a summary of remarks I made at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference 2023 in Austin, TX. The panel discussion was sponsored by the Voice & Speech Trainers Association focus group and also included Irene Alby, Aimee Blesing, Amy Chaffee, Kristi Dana, and Colton Weiss. Panelists were asked to position

“Intentional Co-Evolution: Towards an Impact- Aware, Collaborative Voice Pedagogy” Co-Presenters: Ashleigh Reade (Boston University), Michael Shipley (Utah State University), Anne Thibault (Eastern Illinois University) The following blog post summarizes my contribution to the panel presentation “Intentional Co-Evolution: Towards an Impact- Aware, Collaborative Voice Pedagogy”: My goal is to describe some specifics of my continuing evolution

First off, some brief lessons from sociolinguistics… Everyone has an accent. To say that someone’s speech lacks accent features is akin to saying that person lacks facial features. When someone is said to have “no accent” (or “just a hint of an accent”), it is likely they speak with an accent that reflects dominant identities

Although I have worked with many different directors of Shakespeare in many different productions, and I pride myself on being a supportive colleague and adaptable coach, it would be disingenuous of me to claim that I do not have certain personal aesthetic preferences when it comes to verse speaking.  Primarily, I believe that poetry should