These words of Cicely Berry, the voice director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, speak to anyone who needs to speak his or her piece - in any arena, at sales meetings or religious revivals. Berry's book will insure that the speaker and the text gets heard - accurately and with true emotional range. Never again will one be accused of simply "reading a prepared statement." Berry's exercises to develop relaxation, breathing and muscular control will literally help everyone breathe easier when confronting the printed page.

"Speaking is part of a whole: an expression of inner life." Cicely Berry has based her work on the conviction that while all is present in nature our natural instincts have been crippled from birth by many processes----by the conditioning, in fact, of a warped society. So an actor needs precise exercise and clear understanding to liberate his hidden possibilities and to learn the hard task of being true to the a instinct of the momenta . As her book points out with remarkable persuasiveness a techniquea as such is a myth, for there is no such thing as a correct voice. There is no right way----there are only a million wrong ways, which are wrong because they deny what would otherwise be affirmed. Wrong uses of the voice are those that constipate feeling, constrict activity, blunt expression, level out idiosyncrasy, generalize experience, coarsen intimacy. These blockages are multiple and are the results of acquired habits that have become part of the automatic vocal equipment; unnoticed and unknown, they stand between the actora s voice as it is and as it could be and they will not vanish by themselves. So the work is not how to do but how to permit: how, in fact, to set the voice free. And since life in the voice springs from emotion, drab and uninspiring technical exercises can never be sufficient. Cicely Berry never departs from the fundamental recognition that speaking is part of a whole: an expression of inner life. After a voice session with her I have known actors speak not of the voice but of a growth in human relationships. This is a high tribute to work that is the opposite of specialization. Cicely Berry sees the voice teacher as involved in all of a theatrea s work. She would never try to separate the sound of words from their living context. For her the two are inseparable. ----from Peter Brooka s foreword to Voice and the Actor

"There is a mystery in every play that is written, no matter whether classical and poetic or modern and demotic, and it is the sound and the rhythm of the writing which take us there." Cicely Berry, the Royal Shakespeare Company's Voice Director, has been working alongside some of Britain's greatest actors and directors for over fifty years and is widely regarded as one of the most significant voice teachers in the world. From Word to Play draws on Cicely's extensive experience of working with theatre companies in Britain and throughout the world. It is her manifesto for a return to the words themselves: for moving away from an over-conceptualised, over-literal view of language and rediscovering the meaning in its sounds and rhythms. At the heart of this book is a concise, practical guide for directors in rehearsal, setting out work strategies that help bring out both the shape and the details within all kinds of text - whether verse or prose, seventeenth-century or contemporary. With a Foreword by Michael Boyd, Artistic Director of the RSC.

Breath in Action looks at the significance of breath to human life - not just the simple fact that if we stop breathing, we die, but also the more subtle ways in which our breath interacts with our voice and our being. Written by experts in vocal and holistic practice, the book is divided into four sections: Breath and the Body; Breath and the Mind; Breath and Holistic Practice; Breath and Performance. It offers the latest theories from a variety of disciplines on how we can be taught to breathe better so as to communicate better, act or sing better, feel better, live better. Combining theory with practice, many of the chapters also offer clearly laid out breathing exercises and techniques. Interdisciplinary in its focus, Breath in Action adds to specialist knowledge in the performance field, whilst also offering enlightening information for those interested in therapeutic and healing processes, movement, and voice and speech sciences.

'The Actor & the Text' brings together the elements of articulation and verbal clarity in a practical way. Building on specific exercises, it relates the practicality of voice production to the challenge of a difficult text.