Preparation for Specialist Study

What skills have you developed since starting college?

Since starting college I have worked on my communication skills. As the days went by, I used the act of transferring information vocally (using voice) to be able to communicate with students in my class and introducing myself to new people I’ve met. In addition, as a class we have been working on our voice and being able to articulate words by repeating a few tongue twisters three times. One example of a tongue twister that we used would be, ‘She sells seashells by the seashore.’

We have also worked on our breathing exercises to help calm our nerves down before a performance. One of these exercises is breathing from your diaphragm; when you take a truly deep breath, you are expanding the lungs, pressing down the diaphragm, and causing your abdomen to expand as your lungs fill with air. Breathing from the diaphragm is going to give you a deeper, fuller breath.  If you’re acting in an emotional scene, you’re going to need as much air possible. This is very important.

I have developed my communication skill memorisation and reading. This is really important for any actor as you need to be able to read scripts and memorise your lines. In order to memorise my lines, I usually read the first 5 lines on my script once and then close my eyes and try and remember them, if I know I can remember them I get the next 5 lines and I do the same, then I try and remember my lines from the beginning and up to where I think I know them. Also, doing this for at least 30 minutes – 1 hour really helps with remembering lines; testing yourself after a few hours tests your brain.