I've had quite the accent mash-up week. Just as I was in the thick of working on my R.P accent for Quills which opens in 2 weeks, I landed a voice-over job requiring an Egyptian and a Romanian accent. Thanks to my degree in foreign languages, and an obscure passion for linguistics, I am able to hear the nuances of accents quite quickly and precisely. And so I had a great time in the studio yesterday recording these clips and it's always useful to add new accents to my repertoire.
Virginia Woolf Radio Play
Last year, I co-penned and co-devised a nifty little Play with Songs on Virginia Woolf and the women of the Bloomsbury Group. We took our inspiration from Woolf's "A Room of One's Own." We performed it to sold-out houses at La Mama as part of their excellent Explorations season. This year, we are transforming our gem of a piece into a Radio Play which we will be recording in the coming months. It's a wonderful challenge to create a project from scratch, particularly about such a heavily analysed historical figure, and then continue to re-work and re-work and re-work it! The songs, composed by Faye Bendrups, are absolute genius and capture the essence of the struggles, the creativity and the wit of these incredible Bloomsbury women. I look forward to further research on Vanessa Bell - the role I play - and the next phase in this ever ongoing process of co-devising.
Claire Nicholls as Virginia Woolf and myself as Vanessa Bell.
Improvised Singing
I had a fantastic weekend participating in a very fun workshop run by Impromptunes, whereby I learnt some tricks and traps of improvising songs. Generally, when I do impro, I love the chance to improvise a song, but I'd never properly learnt about song structure, so it was great approaching it from a more concrete foundation. I also discovered that I can get away with rhyming "Swamp" with "Forest Gump" (when sung in a Forest Gump-like accent!)
Quills - Mockingbird Theatre
I'm thrilled to have been cast in the roles of Madame Royer-Collard/Lunatic in Mockingbird Theatre's production of Quills by Doug Wright, to be performed at the Arts House Meat Market in North Melbourne from 1 - 15 August and directed by Chris Baldock. This will be a wonderful opportunity to develop my own Lunatic character from scratch and improvise this throughout the play. On top of that, I will also be playing dominatrix Madame Royer-Collard who is in the midst of leaving her husband . I look forward to an intense personal journey with this project.
The Penelopiad Pitch!
A show I performed in last year, The Penelopiad by Stork Theatre, was recently accepted by Regional Arts Victoria to pitch to go on tour next year. Our original run of this gem of a show was hugely successful, selling out every single show for 3 weeks straight, as well as garnering #9 in Timeout's Top Ten Best Theatre Shows of 2013 and making it into TheAge theatre critic Cameron Woohead's 'Best Of' wrap-up for 2013. And so, today, we proudly pitched our show to a full house at the MTC. It was such a joy to re-visit the text and songs again and even more special, was the re-connecting with the cast again on stage.
Two Trees audio book
This week I received something rather special in the post. It was a CD with the (almost) final version of Two Trees - the audio book which I recorded last year and co-edited earlier this year. Two Trees is a touching book made up of 36 stories written by Afghan women who have learnt to read and write at the OPAWC Vocational Training Centre in Kabul. The artwork which sits alongside each story is done by Melbourne artists and the original idea for the book came from talented Melbourne artist Gali Weiss. The project has also had the support of SAWA (Support Association for the Women of Afghanistan). Fellow voice artist and project collaborator Janet Watson-Kruse then had the idea of extending the project by creating an audio book version. The result is very moving. Stay tuned for the next phase of this humbling project.
If you wish to purchase the original book, please click here.
VocalLab with David Coury
This weekend I participated in a thrilling vocal workshop - VocalLab - with voice coach extraodinaire, David Coury, currently out from L.A. Having worked with David twice before, this was a great opportunity to add to the vocal building blocks I'd previously learnt from him. It was a very freeing and collaborative singing workshop, in which we melded together several songs of very different styles to create the one eclectic mash-up. As always, it was singspirational!
Melbourne International Comedy Festival
I have survived my third Comedy Festival! Back on the belly-laugh bandwagon with my wickedly funny impro group The Big Hoo-Haa Melbourne, we managed to sell out our Hoo Haa Danger Hour season at The Butterfly Club. As well as this, I also guest performed twice in We, The Jury, a fully improvised, high tension, criminal investigation comedy. Recovery is now in order.
Getting attacked whilst singing in Hoo Haa Danger Hour at The Butterfly Club! (Image: Open Cage Photography)
Dungeon Crawl Comedy
I had the absolute pleasure of being invited to Guest Perform in the improvised sci-fi cult show that is Dungeon Crawl at Trades Hall. Run by awesome nerd comedians Richard McKenzie and Ben McKenzie, I got to throw myself headfirst into the world of Joss Whedon, which I knew little about, compared with the Pop Culture fanatics in the room. I had so much fun winging it on stage with Xavier Micheledes, Karen Pickering and Nick Caddye.
Me on stage with comedian Xavier Micheledes. (Image: RW Young)