The first week of 'Tales From Geppetto's Workshop and trying to find my voice...

After a very long and hard working week of devising and rehearsing ‘Tales from Geppetto’s Workshop’, myself and a team of six are about to embark on six week journey of performing this production to children in schools over London, Great Almond Street, in shopping centres, and at the Chickenshed theatre. And the time has come for our very first and very nerve racking show at St Andrew’s Primary school. A very young Eger audience of sixty sat in front of us wide eyed waiting to be trilled. Everyone gave that look to each other of right we can do this but I’m bricking it, no words were exchanged but we all knew by that look we had each other’s support.

The session starts off with an introduction to who we are and what we do. Then we taught them a section of the show, movement. After this the story of Geppetto’s workshop begins with Geppetto running off to find Pinocchio outside the workshop. As he leaves the rest of the toys Geppetto has created come to life. The story follows a puppet called Pinocchi-u who has to complete five good deeds to get a wish. Along the way Pinocchi-u meets other toys who needs her help like the Pincchi-a, who has lost his conscience, dog and duck who are bad toys trying to trap Pinocchi-u into the fame of dome forever so they can take her wish, the green fairy who needs help recycling, Professors What? Professor Who? Professor When? Professor Where? And Professor Why?; have all given up on fixing their machine and finally Santa who is nowhere near ready for Christmas. In the show we all play a number of different characters using puppets and skins and ourselves, we use songs, speech, visual and sign language to communicate to our audience. After the show we lead a workshop based on the performance for 45minutes.

From the first week of performances we found that the show was too long for the time slot of an hour and a half where we were meant to perform the show for 45minutes and lead a workshop for 45minutes too. We decided that during the shows we would have to watch the time and judge what scenes could be performed. Obviously when performing in front of an audience you see what works what was well received and what didn’t. So from this we put in extra rehearsals to tighten the performance and make sure the message we want to deliver is clear.

I felt through this first week of performances I found my character, the voice and my reason of being. I tend to always have a late process into finding my true character, but an even later one with finding my voice/ accent, I find it especially hard to find voices/ accents to suit my characters, I have quite a strong north London accent and I don’t really like going for the obvious voices like posh or common, baby or low voice I want to be challenged.

Has anyone one got tips to finding voices or creating new ones as in Tales we use lots of different puppets which each need very different but also unique voices?