The Linklater Center

Françoise Walot

18 Ulverscroft Road
Coventry CV3 5EZ
United Kingdom
UK: 0044 2476 5059 24
Belgium: 0032 479 05 8262
Francoise.Walot@bcu.ac.uk

Françoise Walot is an actor, director and vocal coach. She graduated from the Conservatoire Royal de Liège (Belgium) with a Premier Prix and a Diplôme Supérieur in Art Dramatique with La Plus Grande Distinction. She is a Designated Linklater Teacher, having completed Kristin Linklater’s ‘Freeing the Natural Voice’ teacher training programme in 1993 in the United States. She currently teaches voice in the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and in the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (UK). In the past, she taught voice in the Conservatoire of Liège, at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema in  Lisbon (Portugal), in Mons Conservatoire, and in Cork (Cork School of Music Drama Department). She taught movement and improvisation in Well (The Netherlands) for the Emerson College Boston. She has given many voice and text workshops in French for different theatre groups, for amateur actors, and one to one sessions to actors, teachers and other professionals.

Other training includes movement studies with Susan Dibble, Lorna Marshall (The Body Speaks) and Merry Conway (The Actor as Instrument). Singing with Frankie Armstrong, Venice Manley, Helen Chadwick and Lucy Grauman (Ik Zeg Adieu).

Other recent experience teaching voice includes workshops for poets with the Ledbury Poetry Festival, UK (2015-2017), regular evening workshops in the Linklater method in London http://linklatervoicelondon.simplybook.it , and for the last 6 years, the Natural Voice workshop in Birmingham (Linklater Voice Birmingham) with co-teacher Simon Ratcliffe.

Françoise’s professional acting credits include many productions in Belgium with Le Théâtre de l'Eveil, Théâtre du Parc, le Groupov, l'Atelier Saint-Anne and Le Théâtre du Ciel Noir amongst others. She also wrote and performed her own work (Kabrioles in 1986, Monument à la Femme Inconnue in 1998, Les Femmes Savent Pourquoi in 2005 and Close to my Heart in 2009). For four years in Brussels, she ran Le Théâtre "Le Café!" a small scale theatre devoted to political theatre that produced "Paroles de Femmes" with which she toured extensively in Belgium and Romania (2003). Her directing credits include Chiquet Mawet's plays, and many one person shows (Les Murs ont des Oreilles (Sophie Bonhôte 1997) and Violet Shoe in the Ditch (Diane Broman 2006) for instance. She has directed Duncan MacMillan's “Toutes les Choses Géniales” (Every Brilliant Thing) for the Royal Festival de Spa in Belgium (2018)

PROFILE

I am an actor, director and voice practitioner who teaches spoken voice and text. I was born in Belgium and moved to the UK in 2010. As a young performer I had lots of voice problems and those issues reduced my confidence in my acting abilities. I had tight breathing musculature leading to breathiness which caused throat pain, no vocal resonance and headaches while performing. It's because of those difficulties and limitations that I became interested in vocal issues. I met Kristin Linklater in Belgium in 1985 during a one week voice, sound and movement and text workshop. After that workshop I decided to study voice and travelled many times to the US to work with her. I completed the Linklater training in 1993, including movement studies with Trish Arnold. The work transformed my relationship to my voice and my acting. I started teaching voice in the Conservatoire de Liège while performing in classical and and experimental plays. I taught in the Conservatoire of Mons (B) until 2010, when I moved to the UK.

I became a visiting lecturer at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in 2011 and have joined the faculty as Assistant Lecturer in Voice in 2017. I teach voice into text for the BA Applied Theatre year 1 and 2, practical voice on MA Acting, MFA Acting in the British Tradition year 1 and 2 and MA Professional Voice Practice courses. I also provide vocal support on student productions (BA Applied Performance). Since 2017, I teach Embodied voice practice to the Voice Studies Master's students at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. In addition to teaching voice, I am providing pastoral, academic and pedagogical support to the students including supervising Postgraduate research project in acting. Outside the conservatoire training setting, I am translating into French Kristin Linklater's book "Freeing the Natural Voice" and working as a theatre director.

My research interests focus on three main areas:

-The translation into French of Kristin Linklater's book "Freeing the Natural Voice" and dissemination of the Linklater work in the francophone world. (I translated Linklater's speech "Freeing the Natural Voice'  for the Colloque international "Pratiques de la voix sur scène: de l'apprentissage à la performance vocale". See: "Pratiques de la voix sur scène: de l'apprentissage à la performance vocale" published aux presses Universitaires de Provence (Incertains Regards) Cahirs Dramaturgiques (2018) http://incertainsregards-theatre.net/spip.php?article111

-How to use the voice work to help actors when I direct performances.

-How the voice work connects to creativity, not only while performing, but while making theatre.

These continuous experiences of translating, directing and writing help me in developing and deepening my understanding of how the voice works: they enrich my practice as a voice teacher.