Light Reading

I finally got around to cleaning my room today and filing the horde of papers strewn about my living space. But what's more exciting (for me) was that I've officially compiled all of the books I'll be taking with me to Vancouver in May to Canada's National Voice Intensive. I'm very much looking forward to this experience, and having the stack sitting here on my desk makes me feel like things are beginning to happen. These books will serve as valuable references for the work that will go on during our five weeks there. Here's a list with brief descriptions of each book.

These are the four plays with which we'll be working. All are by the homie William Shakespeare.

The Merchant of Venice

Twelfth Night

Julius Caesar

Antony and Cleopatra

These plays, along with various Shakespeare sonnets chose by the participants, will be our primary source material for all of the text based explorations.

Freeing The Natural Voice (revised and expanded) by Kristin Linklater - Since the primary work of the Voice Intensive is based in the tradition of Linklater, this book is a wonderful reference for examining the vocabulary, progression, and function of voice practice.

The Eloquent Shakespeare by Gary Logan - This is one of the most valuable publications available for any actor who wants to work with Shakespeare. Many of Shakespeare's words have foreign or double pronunciations, and this book is magnificent in decoding them. (Plus, Gary's my homeboy!)

Shakespeare's First Texts by Neil Freeman - It's a wonderful guide to the structure of Shakespeare's verse. This book is quite helpful in making sense of how Shakespeare used phrasing, punctuation, and persuasion.

Shakespeare's Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary by Alexander Schmidt - This two volume set defines every word in every single one of Shakespeare's plays, poems, and sonnets in the given contexts of each work. If you're an actor who works with Shakespeare and you don't have these, you're kidding yourself.

Speech Sounds (2nd Edition) by Patricia Ashby - Last year during my training as a voice teacher, we had rigorous sessions of learning the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA. This book is a clear and simple resource that allows easy access to IPA without making it feel cumbersome or intruding on the spontaneity of the voice work.

The Viewpoints Book by Anne Bogart and Tina Landau - This is coming with me to help me shake things up a bit; not too much, and not in a rebellious way, but simply to keep folks on their toes.

The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare - While the Voice Intensive participants are working on their monologues and scenes, I'll be working on this. I've been cast as Polixenes in a production of this play at the Delaware Shakespeare Festival, and I'll be primed to begin after time at the Intensive.

Tomorrow I'll be heading to Brooklyn, the home of our current Emcee of the Month, Joell Ortiz. My friend Mariana's party is Saturday night and I'm not missing it for the world. If I bump into Joell, maybe I'll tell him what I'm doing over here to see what he thinks. Who knows, I may just get an interview or something!

peace.