Spring/Summer 99 p. 11

Newsletter Regional Editors

NEW ENGLAND
(ME, VT, NH, CT, MA, Rl)
Marya Lowry
60 Tolman St., West Newton, MA 02165
617-736-3341 Email: <lowry@binah.cc.brandeis.edu>

MID ATLANTIC
(NY, PA, NJ, DE, MD, D.C.)
Donna Snow
109 Warfield Road, Cherry Hill, NJ 08034
609-795-3534 or 215-204-8414

SOUTH EAST
(WV, VA, NC, SC, GA, AL, FL, TN, KY)
Christine Morris
1330 Mordecai Dr., Raleigh, NC 27604
919-839-6255 Email: <CMorris@ acpub.duke.edu>

EAST CENTRAL
(OH, Ml, IN, Wl, IL)
Karen S. Rykcr
6006 Vilas Hall - 821 University Ave., Madison, W1 53706-1497
608-882-3731 (H), 608-263-3355, 3-2329 (W)
Fax: 608-263-2463 Email :<ksryker@facstaff wisc.edu>

WEST CENTRAL
(MN, IA, ND, SD, NE, KS)
Paul Meier
4703 Blucbird Lanc, McClouth, KS 66054
913-863-2518/864-3944 Email :<pmeier@eagle.cc.ukans.edu>

SOUTHERN
(MS, LA, MO, AR, OK, TX)
Dcborah Kinghom
524 Hawthorne, Houston, TX 77006
612-936-9374 (H) 612-474-4289 (W)
Email: <dkinghom@UH.EDU

WESTERN
(MT, WY, ID, UT, CO, NV, AZ,
NM, WA, OR, CA, AK, Hl)
Kathryn Macs
1530 South Quebcc Way #23, Denver, CO, 80231
303-893-4000 Email: <kmaes@carbon.cudenver.edu>

CANADA
Anne Scnnnger
1431 Carlyle Rd. SW, Calgary, ALB T2V 2V2 Canada
403-259-3274 or 403-240-8940

INTERNATIONAL
Lise Olson
Lipa, Mount Street

Regional News Regional news helps VASTA members network. Let everyone know of your special projects, awards, promotions, research plans and results and/or need for information and assistance. Respond when your Regional Editor calls or contact her/him with your news. An asterisk (*) designates a request for information. For the name of your Regional Editor, see the list above or contact Craig Ferre, Fine Arts Division, Brigham Young University - Hawaii Campus, 55-220 Kulanui Street, Box 1953, Laie, Hl 96762.

Regional News

New England

Eric Armstrong, Brandeis University, has been busy coaching shows for Brandeis, including The Crucible this spring and a new play The Milk of Human Kindness. He also coached accents on A View from the Bridge for Walnut Hill High School for the Performing Arts. This January he attended Canada's National Voice Intensive Colloquium in Vancouver. In April he performed in Fiorello! at Brandeis and coached accents for the New Rep Theatre.

Alex Davis, formerly Artist-in-Residence in Voice and Speech at Brandeis University, has now joined his wife in their seasonal business on the coast of Maine. He continues to free-lance as a speech and dialect coach and plans to get back into acting.

Nancy Houfek will be teaching at the Moscow Art Theatre, where the A.R.T students are in residence, in May. For the American Repertory Theatre she coached the new Don DeLillo play Valparaiso; Robert Brustein's new adaptation of The Master Builder and The Cripple of Inishmaan directed by Scott Zigler, as well as a student production of King John directed by Alvin Epstein. She has instituted a lecture series with the Derek Bok Center for Teaching & Learning at Harvard called "Teaching as Performance" and will continue with similar presentations at the Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Law School. Also, Nancy is organizing the next Fitzmaurice Voicework 5-day Intensive which will take place June 22 - 26 at the A.R.T. in Cambridge.

Gillian Lane-Plescia was Dialect Coach for Pygmalion at Seattle Rep, for A Christmas Carol at Hartford Stage, and the Classic Stage Company's production of The Misanthrope, adapted by Martin Crimp, starring Roger Rees and Uma Thurman. Having completed "Irish for the Actor, Vol. 2," Gillian now is getting down to serious work on completing "American Southern, Vol. 2." Upcoming projects include coaching The Clearing at Hartford Stage, The Importance of Being Earnest at Long Wharf, and Sweeney Todd at the Guthrie Studio.

Marya Lowry, Brandeis U., joined her voice with steel cello (and other bowed metal) and flute to create original music/ sound for Merrimack Repertory Theatre's April production of Patrick Meyers play K2. She was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for the role of Heather Espy in Racing Demon at Merrimack Repertory Theatre by the Independent Reviewers of New England.

Kittie Verdolini is on the Executive Board of the newly founded Lessac Institute. Together with her colleague, Janice Eng, she is helping to plan the first evening-weekend intensive Lessac training workshop, to be held in Boston, hopefully later this year. She recently presented on voice measurement, hydration, clinical studies, and Estill VoiceCraft work at the Second World Voice Congress in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Later this spring she will present at the Canadian Voice Conference in Banff, Canada, at the Otolaryngology Conference in Stockholm, Sweden, and at the Voice Foundation Symposium, Philadelphia.

Mid Atlantic

Barbara Adrian is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Marymount Manhattan College. She has received a $5,000 Sokol Grant for training to earn a Certificate in Laban Movement Analysis and Bartenieff Fundamentals.

Michael J. Barnes just finished dialect coaching Cripple of Inishmaan for the Wilma Theatre and Translations for Temple Theatres. In the fall he coached Temple's productions of Joe Turners Come and Gone and Tartuffe, Born Again, and Rep Stage Company's Neville's Island. In April he taught two workshops for Rep Stage Company in Maryland. One focused on variations of Irish accents, while the other was a Destructuring/ Restructuring Voice workshop.

Susan Blumert served as Voice, Text, and Dialect Coach for a production of As You Like It at Montclair State University in New Jersey in December. She presented her workshop "Say Wot?ã Accents and Dialects for the Stage" at several New Jersey Teen Arts Festivals in the spring.

Linda Carroll married her partner Bill Riley on November 1 st. He is the voice trainer to Celine Dion, President Clinton, and Ben Vereen, among others. On November 29th she gave birth to Jennifer Lassie Riley (61b., 140z., 21" long). Linda was invited to speak for the Second World Voice Congress in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in February. She also taught a course there and participated in two panel discussions. Linda will give a three-day course in Curitiba, Brazil, in July 1999; she will train speech pathologists, voice trainers and performers in Directed Energy Vocal Technique (DEVT). She has been invited to the Voice Foundation Annual Symposium on Care of the Professional Voice this June in Philadelphia. Being a mom for the first time is a real task! And worth the wait!

Tom Casciero completed his Ph. D. in Theatre last spring through the Union Institute. His thesis, "Laban Movement Studies and Actor Training" is a contextual essay coupled with a teaching manual. His research included Laban Studies, Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Method, Lessac and Linklater voice work, a month with Shakespeare & Co., spiritual studies, and vocal singing methods. Since then, he has presented workshops for the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival, ATHE, and the University of Texas at Austin. He has recently been invited by the University of Pretoria to be a guest professor in the fall of 2000, where he will also be an international scholar at their voice and movement educators' conference. Tom is the father of a wondrous 2-year-old, which keeps him very mobile and quite humble.

Janet Feindel presented a Master Class entitled "Reveal Passion Through Language" at the Canadian Voice Care Symposium from May Ist through the 6th, where she also served on a panel discussion, "Voice Coaches and Professionalism." For the seventh year Janet will present a workshop in Philadelphia at the Care of the Voice Professional Voice Symposium.

Catherine Fitzmaurice taught a singing workshop with Joan Melton in N. Y. C. this winter. She will also be leading a Destructuring/Restructuring workshop at the American Repertory Theatre from June 2nd through the 26th. A certification workshop will be offered again in the summer of 2000.

Pat Fletcher teaches voice, speech, and dialects full-time at Rutgers/Mason Grosse campus. Pat coached Ah, Wilderness! (directed by Amy Saltz). In January (1998) Pat attended the Shakespeare & Co. Month-Long Intensive, and as a member of the June 1998 Class she was designated by Kristin Linklater as a Linklater voice instructor. She is working on an individualized Master of Arts Degree in Voice and Speech from Antioch University.

Sharon Freed is working with Dr. Robert T. Sataloff in Acting-Voice Training for the Injured Voice.

Helen Huff has been working on her dissertation titled "That Benefit Racket: Women and the American Benefit Performance, 1840-1875" at the City University of New York and expects to complete it by the end of this year. She also presented a paper at the 1998 Mid- American Theatre Conference titled "The Recovered Performance Career of Malvina Pray Florence."

Kate Ingram participated in the Fitzmaurice/Melton workshops in N.Y.C. during the winter and plans to continue with the work this June at A. R. T. in Cambridge. Recently, she directed Antigone for the SUNY New Paltz Theatre Department and is looking forward to directing her fourth "Shakespeare-Under-the-Stars" summer production Twelfth Night. Upcoming performance plans include a staged reading of Candida (in which she will be playing Candida) for the Mohonk Mountain Stage Company.

Marlene Johnson taught last summer at the Canadian National Voice Intensive. Recently she did a voice-over for a PBS special on Stephen Vincent Benet. Also she directed A Midsummer Night s Dream for the PAYouth Theatre and Uncommon Women for LaFayette College and vocal coached Cripple of Inishmaun, My Fair Lady, All in the Timing and Marat/Sade for various theatres in the LeHigh Valley. She directed Comedy of Errors in February and continues to take master classes with Judith Koltai in Toronto.

Donna Snow, Temple University, did a workshop for the undergraduate and graduate programs at Wayne State University. The workshop was on the Fitzmaurice Method: Destructuring/ Restructuring. She will join Catherine and the Fitzmaurice Associates for the Workshop Intensive at A. R. T. this June.

Barbara Waldinger has been awarded her Ph.D. in Theatre from the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, effective February 1, 1999. Now she is looking forward to finding a full-time teaching position.

Southeast

Cynthia Barrett, University of NC- Charlotte, wrote and received a $12,000 grant from the state of North Carolina to develop a new piece which fuses Eastern and Western dance and theatre techniques. She performed Marianne in The Miser for the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival. She is also a newly certified teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework after completing the training in NYC last summer.

Kate Burke, University of Virginia, received tenure! She also coached Arcadia, two original plays by U VA MFA playwrights (Human Interest and Shatter The Vessel) and Threepenny Opera. She is also teaching a .3 course load (International Business Communication) in the U VA Mclntyre School of Commerce.

Micha Espinosa is now full time faculty at the University of Miami. In addition to her theatre courses, she teaches communication skills at the Law School and accent reduction at the Israeli Consulate. She recently had a string of good luck: a national commercial (Toyota's soccer mom) and a small but very pregnant role in Oliver Stone's football flick Any Given Sunday, and she finally completed the starring role in the underground indie Rope Art. Last summer Micha became a certified teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework. She's looking forward to her 4th year of teaching a summer voice program in Japan.

Elisa Lloyd, Emory U., coached Arcadia and Burning Patience at the Alliance Theatre, Our Town at Theatrical Outfit, Wuthering Heights: The Musical at Theatre in the Square, and directed Love s Labours Lost for Theatre Emory. In late April she played Mrs. Solness in a workshop of a new translation of The Master Builder for Theatre Emory.

Patience Martin of Kentucky served as dialect coach (and was an extra in) the independant film Nice Guys Sleep Alone. The film stars Sean O'Bryan of ABC's "Brother's Keeper" and features Morgan Fairchild. Nice Guys will be released sometime in 1999.

Christine Morris, Duke U, will travel to Portland, Oregon in June for a three- week run of her original solo Blue Roses at Profile Theatre Project.

Carol Pendergrast, East Carolina University, along with several other VASTA members, attended a conference entitled "Actor Training: An International Perspective,' held in January at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. In February, she did the voice and dialect coaching for Our Town, starring Pat Hingle as the Stage Manager, at East Carolina Playhouse.

Pat Toole is enjoying life after retiring from Wake Forest University last year. In April she traveled to Japan with her husband to see old friends and colleagues. (She was concerned, however, that her recent studies in Italian and Spanish wouldn't help her much! )

East Central

Kathy Devecka currently is a nightly voice-over artist for Ohio University Public Television. She also coaches Dr. Harold Thompson the host for Family Health a nationally broadcast weekday radio program on medical matters of interest, which is produced by Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine and Telecommunications Center. Kathy is exploring new applications for voice and breath work through tutorials (on breath and impulse in dance, and in vocal release and vocal health for the dance teacher) with a senior dance major at Ohio University. Kathy just directed and served as voice, speech, text, and dialect coach for an after-dinner theatre production of America s Womenãon Stage by Sandra Sleight-Brennan for a Women's History Month Dinner.

R. Terrell Finney, Jr., University of Cincinnati, recently served as a judge for the Shakespeare Scholarship Competition hosted by the Cincinnati Chapter of the English Speaking Union. He will serve as the producer for Hot Summer Nights, the University's summer theatre.

Linda Gates, Northwestern University, had her article "The Singer/Actor's Voice" published in the journal "Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology" by Scandinavian University Press. She performed in the film Lawrence Melm which shot in Chicago over Christmas.

Marina Gilman is establishing a three pronged private practice in Chicago as a voice teacher in speaking and singing voice, as a speech language pathologist, with a voice specialty, and as a Feldenkrais practitioner. In addition she works part time at The University of Chicago Hospitals Center for Speech and Swallowing Disorders as their voice specialist.

Darrelyn Marx directed Oklahoma! which went up in mid-March. In addition to writing an article for the VASTA Newsletter ("Teaching Voice at the Secondary Level - Is It Possible?"), she is working with Barry Kur, Anne Scrimger, and Nancy Krebs on the VASTA 2005 committee. They will be addressing curricula and resources for secondary school teachers.

Shanna Beth McGee, Case Western Reserve University, spent December acting in the Great Lakes Theater Festival's production of A Christmas Carol. Currently she is coaching the 1999 Case MFA Acting candidates in a production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Cleveland Playhouse, under the direction of Lou Rackoff.

Susan Murray Miller continued as a judge on Chicago's Jefferson Committee, taught part-time at Columbia College and taught intermediate level acting and beginning dialects classes at Victory Gardens Theater. She also was dialect coach for Senachai Theatre's production of Brian Friel's Translations directed by David Cromer. In March, she gave a guest Dialect Workshop at Centre Theatre and Training Ensemble.

Karen Ryker, University of Wisconsin- Madison, coached Wole Soyinka's version of The Bacchae directed by guest director Femi Osofisan, and choreographed by Felabo Soyinkaã interesting project. She's also casting Ernest in Love for the summer season. She attended the "Giving Voice" festival in Wales in April.

Tyne Turner played "Mammy" in a production of Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin MacDonough, directed by Scott Glasser at the Madison Repertory Theatre. Then she was off to the Utah Shakespearean Festival to coach Midsummer Nights Dream, King Lear, and Troilus and Cressida in the Adams Theatre. She recently had an article published in the Equity News about work in the Milwaukee/Madison/ Spring Green region.

West Central

Paul Meier, Theatre & Film, University of Kansas, returned in January to Honolulu and Brussels to direct post-production looping on Father Damien. the feature film which he dialect-coached on Molokai last summer. He is also conducting field-tests of IDEA (International Dialects of English Archive), the on-line dialect archive, among his VASTA colleagues. (See article in this issue.) His production of Measure for Measure concluded a successful run at the University Theatre. This spring Paul dialect coached The Gut Girls, also at KU's University Theatre.

Southern

Rena Cook will be taking a year's leave of absence beginning in the fall to attend The Central School of Speech and Drama in London. This year she directed Dancing at Lughnasa and The House of Blue Leaves. She also served as dialect coach for Betrayal and Tintypes.

Deborah Kinghorn, dialect coached for Gross Indecencies, Misalliance, and Travesties (Alley Theatre); Valley Song and Nixon's Nixon (Stages Repertory Theatre); Master Harold... and the Boys (University of Houston); and directed Kindertransport for Stages Repertory Theatre. Deborah is the new Southern region editor for the VASTA Newsletter.

Western

Heather Hollingsworth, Associate Professor of Acting/Directing/Voice/ Speech at the University of Northern Colorado, recently directed Othello coached dialects for The Miracle Worker and will play Miss Mona in Best Little Whorehouse this summer at The Little Theatre of the Rockies. She is currently coaching the Polish and German dialects for the Lida Project production of The Merchant of ... Auschwitz in Denver. Heather's "Cockney Dialect Workshop" was voted best workshop for the 1998 Colorado Thespian Conference.

Sandra Shotwell, University of Utah, is promoted to the rank of full professor as of July Ist! Also, she dialect coached South Pacific for the Pioneer Theatre Company with Director Pam Berlin.

Canada

Anne Scrimger gave two workshops in classroom communication at Medicine Hat College in January 1999. She is currently in London, where she is training for certification as an NLP (Neuro Linguistic Practitioner). In April she will present a plenary session at the Alberta Association of Rehab Centers conference in Calgary. She will again be Voice Coach for the Shakespeare in the Park company. And then, alas, her sabbatical will be over!

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