Body Knowledge

With a background in theater, I have an intimate knowledge of the physicalization of characters. But as a narrator, there is significantly less space in a recording booth and we're often playing all of the characters at once, so we have to find more nuanced ways to strengthen our characters and bounce between them. Utilizing the emotional knowledge we store in our bodies, posture, and physical touch, we can texturize the performance in a natural organic way.

Did I mention I studied different styles of dance for over a dozen years? That's a story for another day... but dancers develop an awareness of how to engage certain muscles while relaxing others to produce expressive movements that tell a nuanced emotional story. We can use this in narration and, if we take that further, knowing which muscles in your body produce immediate emotional feedback, allows you to yo-yo yourself through emotional scenes with antithetical characters that require you to flip that emotional switch on and off.

To find the ways your body produces emotional feedback and to explore how your voice changes when you are in different postures requires curiosity. Recently I had the opportunity to take an aerial hoop lesson that gave me instant feedback on ways my central nervous system reacts to my hip flexors being engaged and, as it turns out, those muscles that allow you to hang upside down had not been fully utilized since I was a kid so we felt some things....

Bringing awareness to different areas of my body has opened up new pathways to stretch my narration further.