Grr. Well, this past few days has been mostly occupied by recovering from an annoying head cold.  So I dunno what my weight is doing. Fortunately the cold was only coming on Wednesday, my last rehearsal, and it's mostly faded now and should be gone Monday, my next rehearsal.

Well, the last two "rehearsals" haven't so much been rehearsals as workshops; basically excerpts from Kristin Linklater's Freeing Shakespeare's Voice book. 

Monday, we started with a warmup exercise, starting below the diaphragm and exercising resonances and sound production from there up to the top of the head, and back down again. The same sort of stuff one would learn from a good voice coach, but focused more on clear & emotive speech production.

Then he gave us words to think about, like "stone" or "sea", and then asked us to feel the sounds that made up the words and then speak them aloud at our own pace. Then asked questions, like "what does it feel like?" or "what colour is it?" and had us use our answers to those questions to modify how we said them. Exploring emotion and thought and how they modify sound production. 

Then he gave us nouns and verbs excerpted from a sonnet, and asked us to say each word by itself, and after that, to start stringing them together and seeing how their proximity modified each other, but still allowing each word to be its own sound.

Wednesday he gave us a monologue and had us start by reciting it silently, but moving our lips in a very exaggerated way. Then we had to whisper it. Then we had to recite only the vowel sounds -- no consonants, exploring the emotion and feelings. Then again just the consonants, exploring the meaning and intellect of the words. (It took much longer to do the consonants.) Then to put everything together a word at a time, then a line at a time.

Then we went into iambic pentameter, and how it should be thought of only as a heartbeat, not a rule. And we worked on some new monologues, taking turns reciting each phrase, and sometimes more than one person at a time, and that was really cool. And that was about all we had time for.

Tomorrow we do our first read through of the play itself, and the two other professional actors will be there also. (The cast mixes three seasoned pro actors [one of whom is also our director] with us community and student players.) It should be very, very interesting. I'm learning a lot.

I've had the new iPhone for a week, a 6S+. It's very, very good. I'm working on my photography app, which I believe I've mentioned in this space before, and hope to get it out before the end of the year. I was also chosen to receive one of the new Apple TV developer kits. I'm not sure what I'll do with it, but I have some ideas.