(This article was first published in The Times Educational Supplement August 2014) Voice is the most precious and effective means of communication. Yet teachers often work in terrible acoustics. Modern rooms deaden sound, old halls reverberate and echo. Worst of all, you may need to be heard in a playground with no resonance at all. […]
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Don’t feel you have to do this….But this is me being interviewed….https://soundcloud.com/elhurchernnhurcher/mel-churcher-interview-bbc
Someone recently contacted me to see how I feel about microphones being used in theatre. Was projection dead? If so – why? Is it because we are more used to recorded voices? And what should we do? His students found conversational plays the hardest in which to reach an audience past the fifth row. I […]
Mel offers Skype coaching if it is not possible to meet face to face. It has taken me a long time to feel that this is a viable option, but with advances in technology and reports back from actors that it has been worthwhile and valuable to them, I have decided to add this […]
When you are fighting to get auditions, change your agent, fix your showreel, cope with earning enough money in a job that lets you off for castings – it’s easy for the joy to go out of the work. ‘The world is too much with us…’ as Wordsworth put it. But there is a joy! […]
‘Subtext: Any meaning or set of meanings which is implied rather than explicitly stated in a literary work…’ (Oxford Reference) I did a blog a while back called Concealing and Revealing about what lies beneath words (what doesn’t! We’d all get arrested or ostracised from society if we couldn’t hide our thoughts…) and I’ve […]
Time for those resolutions… Instead – think of it as dusting off the cobwebs and letting in the sparkle… Some quick thoughts for basking in that sunshine that will grow brighter as the weeks go by: 1. Step out of your own shadow. Allow yourself to believe that you are worthy of doing what you […]
More and more of us are being asked to self-tape these days. It’s supposed to be greener – it certainly saves producers money – but it puts an extra burden on actors. On the plus side, it probably means you try for more opportunities overall. So look on the positive side – this is a […]
There are many things that drive us into being actors: love of words, the magic of our first theatre visit, our drama teacher at school, seeing ourselves mirrored on screen, the spell-binding movie star on the first film we slipped into under-age. It’s often, also, a need to be loved; a way of escaping our […]
