Enunciation exercises and their application

When you feel tempted to speed up, slow down. Don’t think of these warm-up bits as something to rush through, but rather as an opportunity to feel each sound, consonant and vowel, to let your mouth explore for maximum clarity and let your brain practice precision in speech.

• Ma Ba Pa (5x)

• Na Da Ta (5x)

• Nga Ga Ka (5x)

  
  

• Ma Ba Pa Na Da Ta Nga Ga Ka (5x)

Do all the vowels a time or five.  May Bay Pay.  Nay Day Tay. Ngay Gay Kay.

The secret to tongue twisters: learn the meaning of the words. Then, remain focused on the idea expressed as the words emerge carefully formed to communicate the idea through the specific words.

Eleven benevolent elephants (5x)

The sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick. (5x)

The distinction between the aerated ‘wh’ sound and the clean ‘w’ slips by unnoticed most of the time. A great many American dialects treat them almost identically in casual usage. Maintain awareness of this distinction. When performing, no matter how conversational the delivery, usage rises above the casual. These small audible differentiations allow our words to be more easily interpreted by listeners whether they share your personal regionalisms or not.

Whether the weather be cold,
whether the weather be hot,
we’ll be together, whatever the weather, whether we like it or not.

Each SENTENCE gets a single breath. Go for clarity. Breathe in at the periods and know how much air you need to get through each sentence.  The long final sentence requires more air than each of the first two. We gauge how much breath we need for a thought naturally in daily speech. In performance it serves us to serve up each sentence on its own breath. This is true whether performing Shakespeare or one-liners, conversational story or careful rhetortic.

“What a to do today to die at a minute or two to two.”
A thing distinctly hard to say but harder still to do.
For they’ll beat a tattoo at twenty to two, a rat-a-tat-tat and a tat-a-tat, too and the dragon will come when he hears the drum at a minute or two to two today, at a minute or two to two.