Elena McGhee
Fall 2007 Evaluation
Gary is a wonderful student; prepared, willing to explore and generous to his classmates.
He has made lots of progress in class; his voice was strong to begin with but he has come into a new sensitivity and connection with his emotional life which feeds his voice and adds a new complexity and texture to his instrument.
I encourage Gary to seek out and practice relaxation modes to continue his development and to allow himself to slow down and drop into his breath as the touchstone of his work. Well done!
Submitted on 1/23/2008
Spring 2008 Evaluation
Gary was a tremendous asset in this class. He did very well, and he did well every class. Ready and willing to explore his voice, he made great progress! His voice is strong and clear and his emotional life is deepening. I encourage Gary to continue developing his voice thru his imagination such as Sound & Movement or primitive voice work, because he has all the raw material to truly fly from here! He also has a generosity of spirit and humility that was inspiring. Pure joy!
Submitted on 5/26/2008
Personal Evaluation
It was pointed out to me that I changed my voice during shows. Before this was said I knew I needed to work on my breathing and my voice. Sometimes it takes an outside suggestion to get me moving. In this situation it was a reminder.
Working with Elena has been excellent. As sport training helped to build a repertoire of techniques that will aide me in the future. I’ve known how to stretch for athletic based situations. But the methods needed to prepare the jaw, toungue, head, shoulder, etc. had been lacking.
Class is still in session and we have begun work on ‘Sound and Movement,’ a style similar to Ed Sherin’s work. After the semester is over I’ll reflect on that and other thoughts related to the class and the Linklater techniques.
Update 05/2009:
Looking back on the spring semester I found many things to be beneficial to my learning style and others I found completely unfulfiling.
The key things that stand out involved colors, ideas – concepts – that we played out with out body. I had one previous experience with this type of movement and found it entirely unhelpful. Happily I found myself connecting to some of the concepts though it was barely a 50/50 split.
Were I to take a Linklater class/workshop again I would like to work for longer periods of time with a class larger than 5 people. At times it felt as though something was holding back individuals and/or the group. This was likely entirely in my head which explains why I would like to work in a larger group. =)