What does this particular writing ask your voice to do?
The Actor and the Text, by Cicely Berry.
What the book addresses
Berry investigates how actors enter and communicate dramatic language, with practical work on the relationship between the written text and spoken performance.
How to read it
Attend to the writer's choices before replacing them with a generalized emotional mood. Syntax, sound, rhythm and changes of thought can all offer information. An interpretation should continue to make contact with the words, and a technically precise reading should remain alive to the person receiving them.
An original rehearsal investigation
Mark the place where a thought changes direction in a short passage. Speak through the change to a listener who needs something from you. Ask what the listener understood to have changed. Try another reading that preserves the words but changes what you are attempting. Keep both discoveries available until the whole scene clarifies the choice.
Connections and distinctions
Read beside Nelson's Keeping It Active when you want to study rhetorical action, and Linklater when your question concerns the instrument's availability to language. Jason Bennett's emphasis on deep Script and Character Analysis gives this reading a concrete connection to craft without making the teachers' approaches identical.
This is an original JBAS reading guide with an attributed overview and study questions. Read the complete book for the author's developed argument and exercise instructions.
Further Reading · Acting, voice and psychology encyclopedia · Teacher and practitioner profile
