SPRING 2025
CLASSES
“The actor must crave insecurity, the unknown, the uncharted boundaries of imagination, because traveling along that edge leads to the promised land of creativity.”
Kristin Linklater – Freeing the Natural Voice
DROP-IN WARM-UPS
Saturdays 10 am - 10:50 am
(Eastern Time Zone, USA)
March 29 - May 17
8 Sessions
Fee: $20 per session - pay as you go
Location: Online
Taught by: Andrea Haring
Designated Linklater Teacher
REGISTER NOW!
The discipline and tactile pleasure of stretching and elasticizing one’s body, of freeing the breath, and gathering the resonance of the sound vibrations in the bony hollows of the body; of undoing specific tensions in the jaw, tongue and larynx; and waking up the sweep of one’s vocal range, and engaging the lively economy of the articulators; may seem on one level as the routine of little actions, but on a deeper level it is carving out time and space in our busy day to meet ourselves – to be present in our whole being.
Come warm up with us – to prepare for an audition or a show, to care for vocal strain, or just to keep in vocal tone. Want to spend a few minutes each week investing in yourself and strengthening your craft? This series of exercises is designed to free your voice, mind, and body to find your authentic self, and to become more expressively present in the world.
VOICE Level 1
Teacher: Dianna Cortez
Designated Linklater Teacher
Tuesdays 6 pm - 7:40 pm
(Eastern Time Zone, USA)
March 25 - May 13
8 Sessions
Fee: $295
Location: Online
REGISTER NOW!
Relaxation and release is essential to opening, freeing and ultimately strengthening your voice. In this initial class, you are becoming aware of how your voice and body carry habitual tensions and beginning to undo them. This is the start to freeing your breath and vibrations of sound. As your voice begins to loosen up, the next step is to develop resonance by sensing and spreading the vibrations through the bony hollows of your body. Once this connection is established we can move onto addressing deep tensions that develop in the jaw, larynx, and tongue and encourage your sigh to find a free and focused pathway beyond those tensions that filter your message. By giving your sigh of sound a clear passageway from the lower body all the way up through the mouth, you will be ready to begin to strengthen the voice and activate more expressiveness with the resonating ladder. In Voice 1 you will contact the chest, the mouth, and the teeth resonators and blend to find a warm, relaxed and focused connection between your thoughts, feelings and your voice.
fELDENKRAIS & Voice: speaking from the ground up
Teacher: Tamala Bakkensen
Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner®
Designated Linklater Teacher
Wednesdays 6 pm - 7 pm
(Eastern Time Zone, USA)
March 26 - April 30
6 Sessions
Fee: $160
Location: Online
“The muscles that articulate words must be freed from limiting conditioning and made responsive and agile enough to reflect the agility of the mind…A sensitive performer will want a voice that serves the desire to communicate.” Kristin Linklater, Freeing the Natural Voice
Tamala Bakkensen synthesizes the work of two brilliant teachers, Kristin Linklater and Moshe’ Feldenkrais, to help you liberate your body and free your natural voice by using them in healthier, more pleasurable and intelligent ways. Powerful Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement Lessons® will help to clarify the ways in which your skeleton can support the weight and work, and free your breath and voice. Where your breath goes, your voice goes.
Understanding our skeleton and its support of our whole body in gravity from the ground is the foundation for any performing artist in discovering how to “find maximum affect with minimal effort.”, to free muscles and breath in order to fulfill genuine impulses through our body and voice.
In this class, you will focus on finding more freedom in breathing by developing a more intimate relationship with your whole skeleton from the ground up. Students will learn about functional anatomy to help them expand their self-image and choices in movement. This in turn allows more freedom for breath to move your body in different relationships to gravity.
Whether lying, sitting, standing, walking, or running, this is an opportunity to reconnect with the vital rhythm of your essential breath as you move through life. You will apply these principles to a piece of text you would like to explore.
Discover how moving with deep awareness, sensing, and feeling where impulses arise in your body and mind, and releasing habitual patterns of tension and muscular effort will help you to embody changes and unlock your potential to move and breathe with more freedom and pleasure in all you do.
LINKLATER & CHEKHOV: Expressive Embodiment
Teacher: Brett Radke
Designated Linklater Teacher
Certified Teacher in The Michael Chekhov Technique
Thursdays 6 pm - 7:30 pm
(Eastern Time Zone, USA)
March 27 - May 1
6 Sessions
Fee: $230
Location: Online
“Sensation is the vessel into which your genuine artistic feelings pour easily and by themselves; it is a kind of magnet which draws to it feelings and emotions akin to whatever quality you have chosen for your movement.” - Michael Chekhov
Brett Radke synthesizes the work of two dynamic teachers, Kristin Linklater and Michael Chekhov, to unite the actor’s body, voice, intellect, and emotional life through imagination to support the expressive embodiment of imagery, language, and character.
In this class we build on Kristin Linklater and Michael Chekhov’s acknowledgement that the body and psychology of the actor are connected. Each class will begin with a physical and vocal warm-up, followed by a series of psychophysical exercises designed to awaken your creative spirit, tap into your higher intellect, and embrace artistic freedom. You will apply tools like Sensation, Atmosphere, Archetypes, and the Four Brothers (form, ease, beauty, the whole) to speaking a piece of text of your choosing. Through this process of exploration and application, you will find your body and voice can work in harmony with your imagination to support the truthful and dynamic expression of language.
This class is designed to support those who have previous exposure to the Michael Chekhov Technique, as well as those exploring it for the first time. If you are looking to deepen your connection to voice and language through practical and imaginative psychophysical exercises, this workshop is for you.