La Répétition and Voice Work

Weimar Berlin Cabaret Show

 In French they call the rehearsal “La Répétition” - the repetition. This idea used to repel me as I had been trained to think of the rehearsal as anything but this.

As my knowledge of the creative process and of voice work dramatically expanded through working with Present Tense Theatre, I have come to cherish the repetition; for it is through repetition that we truly find what is missing.

The same can be said of our voice technique.

When all is said and done, voice work is not a linear accumulative process. We may learn a series of skills one week, but then those skills need to be constantly revisited, within a framework of knowledge accumulated in between visits, and with ever-constant curiosity to really form a solid technique.

Much of the time voice work is about unlearning habits. Those of us who have come up through a system of “voice beautiful” have had to undo habits that we were drilled in from an early age. It was something that my first acting lecturers could never achieve and I never found my own true voice until I worked with directors Bryce Ives and Nathan Gilkes only a few years ago using the their own version of “La Répétition”.

Until then I had been frustrated, always putting in the work, thinking that a cerebral knowledge would suffice and was, in fact, superior. It was through the repetition that my own voice started to connect to my breath for the first time wholly within the creative process, and not just as an exercise.

Does this then make voice work boring? Anything but.

It means that in our voice work, as in our performance work (in my world they are one and the same, but some beg to differ) we can find rhythms, patterns, tempos, peaks and moments of shatter. It means that we can more closely align our daily voice work with our performance work, closing that frustrating gap. It means that we can spark our curiosity at the outset of every voice session and carry it onto the rehearsal room floor.