Join us for Louis Colaianni’s Voicing, Speaking, Accents, and Vocal Transformation Workshop A Linklater-based Workshop featuring Colaianni Speech and phonetic pillows. This workshop is a rethinking of conventional voice and speech pedagogy.

Thursday, January 12 through Sunday, January 15, 2023
Convenient Manhattan, New York City Location TBD
10:00am to 5:00pm each day, with a 30-minute lunch break at 1pm

Registration is secured by paying the workshop fee of $600. Venmo is preferred.
Please register early, we're already filling up and space is limited!
The Venmo handle is: @Louis-Colaianni
You may also pay by PayPal, Zelle, or credit card.

For more information about the workshop, or payment assistance, please email LouisColaianni@gmail.com or call +1 (816) 419-6915

This workshop reflects the combined processes outlined in the books Freeing the Natural Voice by Kristin Linklater, 2006, and The Joy of Phonetics and Accents by Louis Colaianni, 1994. The workshop modifies both approaches for the purpose as a non-prescriptive process for phonetics, speech, articulation and vocal transformation.

“Colaianni has developed ways of extending freedom and sensuality from voice into speech so that one need no longer divide voicing from speaking.” —Kristin Linklater, Freeing the Natural Voice, 2006

This Workshop is dedicated to social justice practices for anti-racist theatre training. Repairing harm to BIPOC actors caused by training that favors white identity. Dismantling white supremacist educational values. Maintaining safe, nurturing space, where racial, ethnic, gender, cultural, class, and other differences do not encounter barriers to breathing, voicing, speaking, story-telling and character embodiment.

Wear loose, comfortable clothing in which you can easily move. Bring a piece of text, could be a monologue, poem, etc. You will use this text primarily to notice any change in how you speak after each exercise.

This workshop will cover Linklater warm up with additional sounds; Adding a full array of vowels and consonants to a Linklater Voice warmup, which is usually done with a select few vowels and consonants; tuning in to resonance; exploring and embodying the intrinsic pitch and resonance of vowels using exercises originated by W A Aikin, author of The Voice, 1900. Aikin’s Resonating Ladder was Kristin Linklater’s source for vowel work. The resonating ladder with consonant launchers, also know as Kristin Linklater’s "Zoo Woe Shaw" exercise, as it appears in her book, Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice, 1992; The consonant mouth; transforming the studio into a gigantic human mouth mapping the locations for shaping and articulation of consonants and vowels; creating a practice for physical, three dimensional phonetic transcription of text; mapping your own pronunciations in an outline of your own accent; exploring the role of consonants (and vowels) in language, as markers of meaning; exploring the role of vowels (and consonants) in language as expressers of feeling Phonetic comparisons of your own accent with those of others; comparing the way your articulators shape your sounds to the ways other participants shape their sounds; transforming your own voice accent traits to those of speakers on audio interviews and using phonetics and the processes of verbatim theatre.

The workshop culminates with application of the skills and experiences of the work above.