Winter 2001 p. 8

REGIONAL NEWS

INTERNATIONAL

LINDA CARTWRIGHT (UNITEC School of Performing & Screen Arts, Auckland, New Zealand) has been busy co-coordinating two six-day intensive courses in Estill voice work, which will take place in Auckland and Wellington this month. Anne-Marie Speed (President of the British Voice Association) will come from London to teach the work. Linda has also assisted with a production of War and Peace, which was adapted from Tolstoy’s novel by the Head of the Acting Major at UNITEC. It provided goods parts for 8 women and 10 men, was very successful, and much appreciated by audiences.

FLOORTJE NIJSSEN (Belgium) was asked to lead a theatre project for fifth and sixth-grade students in an elementary school in Belgium. After a few sessions she discovered that the group contained some really talented individuals, so she risked doing Sophocles’ Antigone with them. She adapted the entire text so that it would be accessible for children. It is hoped that this text can be edited and used by other schools. It has been a great success for children and parents alike, sparking a lot of interest in Greece and Greek culture! Floortje is also busy preparing the 10th Myth and Theatre Festival with Pantheatre, Paris. The Festival will take place in Belgium in July 2002, with a 2001 version in New Orleans.

LISE OLSON (Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts, UK) presented a paper and workshop at SAPVAME in Pretoria, South Africa, on the nature of collaboration with colleague/collaborator Evelyn Jamieson. As an invited guest, she attended the Voice Institute’s Symposium entitled “The Moment of Speech” co-sponsored by the Central School of Speech and Drama and the National Conference of Drama Training. She also voice/dialect coached a new adaptation of Henry IV and Stephen Sondheim’s Company, and is currently coaching the cast of the new UK National Tour of Rent.

BILL PEPPER (NIDA, Australia) is off to London for some R& R shortly. NIDA’s academic year has just finished and Bill is proud of the quality of the four post-graduate Voice Studies students who will be making their way in the voice-teaching world. This Voice Studies course is run every second year, and Bill will therefore fully devote himself to the acting course next year. NIDA is contemplating the possibility of up-grading the Voice Studies course to an MA. Any feedback or advice from VASTA members would be much appreciated.

MID ATLANTIC

MARY BAIRD just finished 8 weeks of teaching Linklater Voice, Acting, and mentoring the 2nd year MFA students at A.C.T. in San Francisco. Starting January 2001 she will teach Linklater voice, dialects and vocal coach the productions at The University of Indiana at Bloomington. She is currently working on a new cabaret show.

ADELE CABOT was the Voice and Speech Consultant for K2 at Arena Stage in Washington, DC. Last season for Arena she coached The Royal Family, Guys and Dolls, The Miracle Worker, Blue, and All My Sons. She played Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing for the Shakespeare Project and directed The Scarlet Letter for The National Players. She taught at the Shakespeare & Co. Weekend Intensive, that was held at Olney Theatre Center in Olney, MD.

CATHERINE FITZMAURICE spent the summer working with new MFA students at The American Repertory Theatre, and this past fall semester has been adjunct-teaching at Yale School of Drama. She will be offering workshops at University of North Carolina—Greensboro and in Chicago during the summer.

PAT FLETCHER continues to teach Speech in the MFA program at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She is currently Dialect Coach on the Main Stage production of Camino Royal being directed by Amy Saltz. Other current work includes: Speech and Dialect coach in the Actor’s Studio MFA program at the New School for Social Research; Voice, Speech and Dialect instructor at the Esper Studio in NYC; Voice and Speech Coach for several corporate and private clients in and around NYC.

LEE SMILEY-GRACE has been teaching three voice classes at University of the Arts, and one voice class at the University of Pennsylvania. Lee has also been teaching a speech class at University of the Arts using Louis Colaianni’s Pillows and the workbook created by Colaianni and Claudia Anderson. Lee reports that the students love this way of learning and find it challenging and tactile. Lee is also training in a variety of methods of movement work and incorporating it more in the voice/speech teaching. Lee’s two-year-old daughter is learning to sing 40 very loud songs. She is an excellent teacher.

BARRY KUR (Penn State University), this Fall, vocal/text/dialect coached for the Penn State School of Theatre Productions of Lucky Stiff, Julius Caesar, Spike Heels and The Piano Lesson. This spring Barry will be on sabbatical leave offering Lessac master classes/residencies at University of Pretoria and Pretoria Technikon, South Africa; University of Miami-Ohio; and The South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities.

ELIZABETH VAN DEN BERG served as vocal consultant on a production of The Crucible at Western Maryland College (WMC), where she continues as a part-time Senior Lecturer in the Theatre Arts Department. She also served as a respondent for KC/ACTF Region II, and will be attending the Regional Festival at Carnegie Mellon where she will serve as a preliminary Irene Ryan respondent. Next spring she will direct Little Shop of Horrors for WMC.

LYNN WATSON joined the faculty of the Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) this fall teaching voice/speech and acting. After making the move east, her first assignment was coaching Arena Stage’s 50th anniversary production of The Great White Hope. Prior to that she completed her third season at South Coast Repertory; most recent coaching there included Norman Conquests, The Philanderer, the world premiere of Howard Korder’s The Hollow Lands, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, and the west coast premiere of Amy’s View. For UMBC, she coached productions of Picnic and a new version of Cocteau’s Orphee. She taught in a Fitzmaurice Voicework workshop at A.R.T./Harvard and worked for Cornerstone artistic director, Bill Rauch, as voice/movement guest artist for the Cal State Summer Arts Festival. Lynn chaired the VASTA committee on outreach to theatre directors and joined IDEA as an editor.

KATE WILSON dialect coached the Broadway revivals of Betrayal and Gore Vidal’s The Best Man. At Juilliard she coached The Memorandum, Venice, The Love of Three Oranges, and is currently in rehearsal with Richard II.

SOUTHEAST

MICHAEL BARNES did the voice and speech coaching for productions of The Dining Room and Antigone at the Ring Theatre this fall, and taught in the Fitzmaurice Teacher Certification program this past summer. His article “A Critique of Phonetic Transcription in American Actor Training” was published in the Voice & Speech Review’s Standard Speech and other contemporary issues in professional voice and speech training, and Theatre and Film on the Net, which he co-authored, was just released by Allyn & Bacon.

KATE BURKE (University of Virginia) spearheaded the UVA departmental application to join the National Association of Schools of Theatre, spoke to Folger Library docents on “Creating a Voice for Shakespeare’s Theatre”, hosted Andrew Wade for master classes at UVA and Virginia Tech, and directed a staged reading of Blood River Epic, soul-searching Amazon tales by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Fellow Jean Arrigo for the Virginia Festival of the Book. She also served on a steering committee, that formed the St. Anselm Institute, devoted to promoting Catholic intellectual life at the University of Virginia, and to contributing to Catholic intellectual and cultural life in the U.S.

BRIDGET CONNORS directed The Rimers of Eldritch in the fall at Florida Atlantic University where she is an Assistant Professor. Next semester she will be performing in Mark Harlick’s play The Legacy at New Theatre in Miami, and the musical Do I Hear A Waltz based on the play Time of the Cuckoo.

DAYDRIE HAGUE (Auburn University) is serving as an associate editor for IDEA; dialect coached You Can’t Take It With You and a studio production of Chicago, and will be directing Three Sisters in the spring.

MARLENE JOHNSON (Florida State University) coached Twilight LA and The Comedy of Errors for FSU in the fall, and will be coaching Cabaret, Othello, The Diary of Anne Frank (in which she will also play Mrs. Van Daan), The Skin of Our Teeth, and Woyzeck in the spring. She reports that she is very happy in her new job at FSU and loves Tallahassee.

CHRISTINE KEEFE played Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard at The Warehouse Theater (Greenville, SC), and also coached that production. She taught a voice/movement workshop for theatre educators as well as students at the South Carolina Theatre Association Annual Convention. Kristen Linklater was the keynote speaker and presented a master class in Shakespeare and language. In January, Christina hosted the SC Governor’s School for Science and the Humanities, where she taught a text and movement workshop on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In February she coached The Trojan Women at the new SC Governor’s School for the Arts.

DEBORAH LEDERER is working with the National Opera Company (based in Raleigh, NC) as Narrator on a production of Cosi Fan Tutti, that is touring public middle schools. She will also be in a winter production of Echoes by N. Richard Nash.

ELISA LLOYD (Emory University) coached Love’s Labor’s Lost for the NC Shakespeare Festival; A Moon for the Misbegotten, The Book of Ruth, and A Christmas Carol for the Alliance; A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Georgia Shakespeare Festival; Loot for Actor’s Express; and Shaw’s epic play Back to Methuselah for Theater Emory. Recent acting roles include the Duchess of York in Richard II and Mrs. Lutestring/She-Ancient in Back to Methuselah, both directed by Tim Ocel.

CHRISTINE MORRIS (Duke University) became Director of Undergraduate Studies for Drama, adding to her usual teaching, coaching and directing duties at Duke.

BONNIE RAPHAEL (University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill) traveled to Montreal at Thanksgiving, where she taught a daylong workshop at Montreal General Hospital. About fifty participants, most of them voice and speech pathologists, were taught exercises and strategies from theatre practice that they might use with their clinical voice patients.

PATTY RAUN (Virginia Tech) coached eleven different dialects (including Hungarian, Greek, and Czech) for a production of Wild Goose Circus by Russell Davis. She directed a production of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music and played a Scottish female pirate in a new play, Short-Haired Grace, at Mill Mountain Theatre. She was thrilled to have Andrew Wade of the RSC visit Virginia Tech, where he conducted two workshops in early October.

JANET RODGERS (Virginia Commonwealth University) reports that The VASTA Voice and Exercise Book continues to move forward. Many thanks to all of those VASTA members who submitted exercises. Publication date is June 2001 by Applause Books. This spring she will be co-coaching, along with Jeffery Smart and Phil Timberlake (two first year MFA students in VCU’s Theatre Pedagogy-Voice and Speech Program), a production of Michael Brown’s The Day The Bronx Died. She will also be coaching Sueno, directed by guest artist Bill Roudebush. Last fall, she played the leading role in Night Sky by Susan Yankowicz.

BENJAMIN SMITH had a busy winter and spring directing A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Julius Caesar, as well as Shakespeare scenes at Raleigh and Durham (NC) area high schools for Burning Coal Theatre Company. He also performed in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a new adaptation of Watership Down, both with Burning Coal.

JUDITH SULLIVAN had a very busy and productive fall with 2 months of non-stop consulting for BellSouth, at Amelia Island, and Bass Hotels and Resorts in both Atlanta and Las Vegas. In addition, she is the voice trainer from WebMD, MBC and has just started consulting with Deloitte Touche. Recently she worked with the International Professional Program with CNN where she trained journalists from Australia, Brazil, China, Ethiopia, The Netherlands, Nigeria, Philippines, Romania, South Africa, Taiwan, and Uruguay. Judith just completed a Voice Class in her teaching studio, The Communicating Voice, Inc., and she anticipates a busy January and February with BellSouth.

ERICA TOLBOLSKI (University of South Carolina) coached Twelfth Night, directed by Eleanor Holdrige, and played Madame Elizabeth in Look Homeward, Angel, directed by Bob Leonard. Both were produced at the University of South Carolina in the fall semester. She co-presented a Mask/Character Voice workshop with Sarah Barker at the South Carolina Theatre Conference festival, that featured guest speaker Kristin Linklater.

ELIZABETH WILEY (The College of William and Mary) directed William & Mary’s production of The Bakkhai in October, incorporating the W&M Women’s Choir as singing chorus, and a separate acting/dancing chorus. The production featured Contact Improv-based movement/choreography and original choral music written by Liz’s husband, David Doersch. Liz will be teaching Voice and Violence again at the International Paddy Crean Stage Combat Workshop in Banff in January 2001. Kaliska (the baby at the VASTA conference) is thriving and has mastered most of the vowels and the consonants m, n, d, b, g, ng, and p!

EAST CENTRAL

ERIC ARMSTRONG (Roosevelt University) has been busy preparing for the VASTA 2001 conference to be held in Chicago! Recent professional coaching includes Amy’s View for Organic Theatre in Evanston, and at Roosevelt, The Bacchae, Old Times and The Mandrake. (Special thanks to Elizabeth Wiley for help with Greek name pronunciation choices!) After designing the new IDEA logo, Eric continues to prepare samples for the IDEA project (Illinois), and managed to land a work-study grant student to gather and transcribe samples! Also, he had the great pleasure of inviting Kate DeVore in to do an excellent talk with the grad actors at Roosevelt on “Vocal anatomy, physiology and care.” Eric keeps busy developing web-based resources for his classes, that you can see (under “classes”) at the voice + speech source .

DAWN ARNOLD (Roosevelt University) co-directed Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman at National Pastime Theatre and at The Chicago Humanities Festival in Chicago, and acted in Flood by Gunter Grass at Alchymia Theatre, Chicago. R.

TERRELL FINNEY, JR. (University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music) directed a production of Adam Guettel’s Myths and Hymns for the Department of Musical Theatre in December 2000.

LINDA GATES (Northwestern University) did the dialect coaching this fall for The Ballad Of Little Jo for Steppenwolf Theatre Company and was the English diction coach for The Great Gatsby at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

MARIAN HAMPTON (Illinois State University) has recently completed coaching Nigerian and British text for a production of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and northern Irish dialects for Lonesome West. During the summer, she served as Japanese dialect coach and was featured as the English Minister’s Wife, singing in an ensemble of six women on a recording of Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen, which stars Mickey Rooney, John Schneider, Charles Nelson Reilly, and Lou Diamond Phillips. Recorded in Los Angeles with Peter Mats as Musical Director, the album will be released in 2001 by Cast Recordings.

JIM JOHNSON (DePaul University) coached dialects for a production of Donald Margulies’ Sight Unseen for the DePaul mainstage, and is directing a workshop production of Romulus Linney’s Holy Ghosts for February. He also attended a movement workshop with Karen Beaumont in November in New York and is assisting Eric Armstrong with plans for the 2001 VASTA Conference in Chicago.

KAREN RYKER (University of Wisconsin-Madison) will be playing Mary in Long Day’s Journey Into Night in February, will continue coaching UW’s season offerings: Spring Awakening, She Stoops to Conquer, Beckett Plays. She is also working on updates and revisions of the VASTA Guidelines for Promotion and Tenure. IF YOU ARE ON A TENURE TRACK AND DO NOT YET HAVE THE CURRENT GUIDELINES, check the notice on the back cover of this issue of the Newsletter, and secure a copy! These guidelines are extremely helpful early in your tenure track—long before you think you need them.

NEW ENGLAND

NANCY HOUFEK began the 2000-2001 season at the American Repertory Theatre coaching King Stag (direction by Andrei Serban with masks and costumes by Julie Taymor), that is now on an 18-month national tour culminating in London. She continued with Antigone (directed by Francois Rochaix), Three Farces and a Funeral (Chekhov short stories), The Doctor’s Dilemma, and Mother Courage. She is continuing a series of workshops on vocal use in public presentations through Radcliffe Seminars, the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, the Professional and Organizational Development Conference in Vancouver, B.C., and New England Cable News. Her film, “The Act of Teaching,” is now available through the Bok Center at Harvard University. Nancy is pleased to announce that The Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard, in collaboration with the Moscow Art Theatre School, will now offer an M.F.A. in Performance with a Voice Concentration under her leadership.

RUTH ROOTBERG is in her first year of “undoing,” otherwise known as learning to inhibit and direct, at ATSNE, the Alexander Teacher School of New England in Amherst, Massachusetts. A portion of her demonstration video “Moving Towards Vocal Center” was shown in October at a benefit for the Laban/Bartenieff Institute for Movement Studies. Ruth has recently conducted a peer review for one of the upcoming VASTA journal articles.

PETER JACK TKATCH (University of Vermont) directed and dialect-coached Blithe Spirit in celebration of the centenary of Sir Noel Coward’s birth and his contributions to the theatrical world. In addition, this fall Peter Jack served as dialect consultant on Sweet Charity.

WEST CENTRAL

PAUL MEIER (University of Kansas) is currently directing and dialect-coaching Blithe Spirit and editing Pedagogy and Coaching articles for the second issue of the Voice and Speech Review. As director of IDEA (International Dialects of English Archive), he reports that over 250 primary source dialect samples are now available at the website, “http://www.ukans.edu/~idea” His dialect course with accompanying CD’s is available with academic discounts at his website, “http://www.paulmeier.com”

SOUTHERN

RENA COOK accepted a new position at the University of Oklahoma, where she serves as voice teacher and dialect coach. This fall she coached Sideman and Cosi. She is currently working on an original musical entitled Lily, Lily and is doing dialect design for a production of The London Cuckholds.

WESTERN

JOAN MELTON taught in the Fitzmaurice Certification workshop in New York, presented at the Voice Foundation symposium in Philadelphia, taught in the Drama Summer School in Dublin, and participated in the VASTA Conference in the summer of 2000. In October, she was a presenter at the Fifth Voice Symposium of Australia, taught a workshop at the Academy of the Arts in Brisbane, and was a guest at the Voice Centre of Brisbane. In November, she did a two-day workshop for musical theatre students of Krista Scott, at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. In January, 2001, she attended the second NATS Conference on Belting, in New York, and taught a workshop at the Central School of Speech and Drama, London, for MA candidates on the Musical Theatre and Voice courses. In February, she presented a workshop at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, Fresno, CA, and in May/June, she will do a second workshop with Kevin Robison at California State University Fullerton. At CSUF, Joan coached Three Sisters, Into the Woods, and Twelfth Night in the fall season, and is coaching Hotel Paradiso, Grasmere (a world premiere), Mama Drama, and Street Scene in the spring. She has had articles published in VOICEPRINT, Newsletter of the Australian Voice Association, in AUSTRALIAN VOICE, and in the Journal of the Australian NATS, and will be a part of the Theory and Practice of Performance Working Group for the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR) conference in Sydney, July of 2001.

© Copyright 1987-2002 Voice and Speech Trainers Association, Inc.