Week seven Acting and Music

In Mike’s lesson we did several breathing exercises to help us with our articulation and diction. Articulation is the clarity in the way we say something, so if I’m saying ‘that’ whilst using a nasal resonator it won’t sound clear, and to make it sound clear I’d need to change the wording and the way I say it to ‘vat’ which would make it seem as if I’m saying ‘that’. Doing that clashes with diction however, diction is to know, and use the correct pronunciation of a word, so me saying ‘vat’ instead of ‘that’ is not correct diction but the correct articulation if used with a nasal resonator. We worked on multiple exercises, to help us improve our articulation, and diction, one of them being the siren exercise which also helps us distinguish the resonators we’re supposed, and meant to be using, a really good exercise we did was tongue twisters, tongue twisters help us improve our articulation, diction, and delivery of words, and how they are meant to be pronounced. A couple examples of tongue twisters we did are; Betty bought butter, but the butter was bitter so Betty had to buy more butter to make the bitter butter better, (something like that) and A big black bug, bit a big black bear, and the big black bear bled black blood. Finally our final exercise was a physical one as well, it involved us being in a tennis ball throwing position, and whenever we delivered the word ‘HEY’ we had to project so that the entire theatre heard us, every time we did so we would extend our arms outwards and throw out the word as if it were a tennis ball.