Two-part workshop includes Part 1: An introduction to a new Color Theory for understanding the IPA Vowel Chart. Inspired by Tyler Seiple and developed by Siobhan Doherty Buffett, this new Color Theory uses a familiar concept (the gradient color picker like those used in Photoshop or Paint) and explores how it can provide a visually appealing way into understanding the IPA Vowel Chart, and can help illuminate the nuance of microtranscription and diacritics.

Part 2: A group workshop on ways to utilize color to explore vocal variety and activate the voice. Participants will be on their feet and exploring colorful imagery through movement and voice to find more vocal variety and play in text.
This workshop can bring new colorful ideas to the future of accent work, create new ways in for learners who may feel overwhelmed by the concepts and symbols of IPA, and can opening up future possibilities for visual art in conversation with spoken art.

This 55-minute workshop proceeds from a simple premise: the voice is not an accessory. It is a way of conducting oneself through the world. Begin with breath, organize the body, and the voice follows. Alter the vocal posture and one discovers not only sound, but also point of view, pace, appetite, and the manner in which the world is met and read. Rather than starting with psychology and expressing it vocally, participants investigate how a specific vocal and physical posture can generate its own appetite and rhythm.

Working with Commedia dell’arte, participants use both literal masks and vocal “masks” to explore different arrangements of sound, rhythm, pitch, and dialect. These early broad strokes are not decorative additions. They produce belief. From belief come opinions, appetites, and relationships. From these emerge the actions by which a person attempts to improve their circumstances moment to moment.

Participants explore how specific vocal and physical choices shape perception, behavior, and relationships. Through guided exercises and improvisation, they track how changes in posture produce changes in worldview. This allows character to emerge through action rather than invention. In supporting the mask, one’s unique and authentic place in the comic world also begins to emerge.

In this 55 minute workshop I would like to offer a brief historical perspective of Alfred Wolfsohn (1896-1962), a pioneer in the study of the human voice. How the work of Wolfsohn has been applied and expanded over the last 50 years principally through the work of Roy Hart Theatre from the 1960’s and Voice Movement Therapy from the 1990’s. Then using practical voice and movement techniques from Voice Movement Therapy with participants, I will demonstrate how his work still impacts us and is relevant today.

The work of Roy Hart Theatre and Voice Movement Therapy, both explore the ‘unlovely’ and extreme sounds of the human voice when congruent with the feeling states. Both tap into the ‘souls calling’ and the work of the psyche to enable participants to free themselves from conditioned behaviors. They do this by working with voice and movement to create collaborative performance in the case of RHT and with the addition of the singing voice, depth psychology and personal transformation using VMT.

Useful applications:
Uncovering and transforming trauma, using breath movement and the singing voice as the primary tool. Broadening our understanding of the full capacity of the voice outside of range, timbre and dialect.

For voice and speech practitioners, the importance of “the thought” is almost a given. In fact, most teachers would point to their head when asked “where does the voice come from?” We know, on a physiological level, that the breath must be fueled by an image, a concept we wish to express, before we can put that thought or image on to the voice and transmit it to the listener.
The concept is a given, but actually teaching our students how to do this is the foundation of our work. We as humans know how to do this fairly well in spontaneous, real life speech, but we struggle when it comes to memorized text.

Different methodologies have come up with different solutions for this problem: dropping in, restructuring, the second circle. The idea that we must be inspired to take the breath because of something outside ourselves, something that triggers the need to speak, is universally understood (and taught). We’ve got the why covered, but not the how.

Enter the Lemma. In psycholinguistic models of speech processing and production, the lemma is the mental representation of a concept that contains both semantic and syntactic meaning, linking an idea to the sounds needed to express the idea. When we want to express an idea, our brain goes in search of a concept, which can activate many different lemmas, and we ultimately select one to move further along in the process of speech production.

Here’s the interesting part; we memorize a script, and while the author’s speech planning might take them down one lemma-road, our brain might instinctively take us down another! When we talk about owning the language, making it our own, this is the obstacle. We can understand the beats, the ideas, work moment to moment and thought to thought, but it doesn’t change the fact that we might select a different lemma than the text instructs to express the same concept.

Incorporating psycholinguistics into our work is a clear way to evolve our pedagogy, and invite new voices into our community. The information is there, and we can move beyond metaphor. This workshop will dive into the psychology of speech planning and production and the use of Stanislavski’s Active Analysis to help bridge the gap between lemmas. Participants will engage in discussion around linguistic concepts and explore how they could apply this knowledge to their current teaching practices.

The focus of this round table is to share experiences of collaboration amongst different voice methodologies in the same actor training program. Do you teach in a program with more than one methodology? How do you collaborate and navigate your different pedagogies and vocabularies? How do you effectively scaffold student learning? Where are the dissonances in training modalities and where are the harmonies and points of contact? How do we take our differences from the past and collaborate effectively with them for our present moment of anxiety, division and distraction? What is coming for us in the future and how can our collaborations present a roadmap for our shared humanity in a world yearning for contact and collaboration?

Two voice practitioners in an intergenerational dialogue that reflects on evolving methodologies, mentorship, and the shifting cultural landscape of actor voice training. I hold a Master’s degree in Voice from the Central School of Speech and Drama in London and bring over 30 years of experience working with the Linklater approach. While I am not formally certified, this is a deliberate choice: my practice and research examines, revisises, and reframes Eurocentric voice methodologies. I aim to honor these foundational forms while reshaping them so that bodies of color can bring their full, authentic selves into voice training spaces.

I propose a conversation with Linda Bisesti, a designated Linklater voice coach, film dialect and voice coach, and retired faculty member from the theatre program where I now teach. Linda and I share a relationship grounded in both lineage and transformation. Her work in film has evolved toward approaches to accents that support clarity and storytelling without requiring performers to erase or diminish their cultural or vocal identities.

Together, we will explore how actor voice training has changed—and how it still needs to evolve—particularly in becoming more inclusive of multilingual and non-native English-speaking performers. As the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants, I bring a perspective shaped by navigating identity within traditional training structures. Our dialogue will consider how mentorship can move beyond ego and how voice pedagogy must reckon with and dismantle harmful power dynamics, modeling a more inclusive and equitable future for the field.

This workshop explores the crafting and shaping of individual expressive actions through improvisational investigations rooted in Michael Lugering’s Expressive Continuum. The work approaches singular actions as foundational building blocks of expression, much like a musician studies individual notes before creating music. By shaping, refining, and repeating actions outside the constraints of text, participants will deepen their understanding of how action conveys meaning and point-of-view.

Traditionally, actor training has often separated body and voice into distinct areas of practice. This workshop instead approaches performance as a holistic and embodied event in which breath, body, voice, thought, and intention exist as an integrated expressive process. Participants will investigate how shaping action expands expressive range, kinesthetic sensitivity, and imaginative potential simultaneously.

Investigating the Expressive Continuum moves participants beyond habitual or predominant behavioral and action patterns. The structured improvisation and embodied exploration create opportunities to investigate greater adaptability, specificity, and awareness while encouraging attendees to explore action itself as a fundamental measure of integrated human expression.

This presentation introduces a pedagogical exploration of the Lessac Kinesensics (LK) methodology applied to Mexican Spanish. It emerges from the experience of a Spanish-speaking student who studied LK in English, recognizing its fundamental principles such as sensory awareness, the embodied experience of sound, and learning through perceptual experience. This work arises from the need to adapt Lessac vocal training to the linguistic and cultural context of Mexico, where the original principles can be challenging to understand in practice due to the absence of direct translations, and because each language carries its own energy and phonetic organization.

Rather than translating terms or reproducing exercises, this proposal focuses on adapting the bodily and vocal explorations that constitute the essence of LK. Elements such as Inner and Outer, Breathe, Pain Relievers, Relaxer-Energizers, NRGs, Y-Buzz, and the tasting of contact points, among others, are explored through the phonetics, rhythm, and resonance of Mexican Spanish. This approach allows participants to embody and internalize the experience from within their own culture and dialect.

Mexican Spanish is named as the focus of this work because it represents the community in which this practice has been developed; however, the approach is conceived as an open framework that may be expanded to other Spanish-speaking communities across Latin America.

Moving your body to music can aide with the release of the voice. The music acts as a scene partner that works on your breathing center and wakes up your imagination and you become present and in the room. It allows for a more vibrant connection to text. In this workshop you will move to music from all over the world with other participants. You will ask the question, “Is moving to music different than dancing to music?” “Does your voice feel liberated after you are done moving?” “How do the diverse sounds, rhythms, instruments and voices effect your body, mind, and therefore voice? The theme asks are good voices beautiful? Joyful? Loud? Quiet? Deep? High? What does it mean to have a good voice? Ragged? Broken? Seasoned? Sweet? Full? Soft? Who gets to have a good voice? The music that will be used in this workshop will have all of these varieties of voices in the room. Participants will move to the voices and the rhythms and beats that go along with them. There will be a discussion after moving about the visceral and immediate reaction to particular music pieces that stop the body, makes the breath stop, or start and why? What are our personal biases when we hear music in another language and from a different culture or country? How can we use many voices and musical styles to help unpack our physical and vocal reactions and liberate the mind? How can this work helps us use our voices and tolerate other voices and celebrate all voices in performance? The kind of music we move to can effect the stories we tell and wake up the breath, body, mind and voice in a very powerful and engaging way. The proposal incorporates music that will capture the many ideas that we may think are good (or bad voices). Participants will be moving to performed music arranged by many identities from around the world -some marginalized, privileged, other languages and cultures will be a topic of discussion after we are done with the initial moving/breathing in community portion. We certainly will discuss cultural attitudes and how our mind, body, breath react when we are in a room of eclectic sound. Do we move to it, or move away from it? etc.

This workshop will critique the past and present ways of engaging with hierarchy within teaching/learning spaces while offering innovative and interdisciplinary ways of framing power through a lens of BDSM/Kink culture in a consent-based performance classroom that trains “future ready” students. We will problematize the ways top-down teaching has perpetuated hegemonies like white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and ableism in past training spaces while critiquing its present remedy (flattening the hierarchy) as a performative over-correction, that often expects historically marginalized students to do more labor to educate others in the space about their experience.

In addition to this theoretical context, participants will learn the basic tenets of BDSM/Kink and how its shared values around consent, safe vulnerability, play, and awareness with voice and performance work make it potentially helpful to reframe power dynamics when teaching. We will share about ways BDSM/Kink ontologies have already inspired new teaching praxes and will culminate the session with participant demonstration and group exercises to offer innovative and intentional methods for engaging with power dynamics in the classroom.

Voice work is a powerful means for personal transformation, embodying principles of liberation of breath and sound. In doing so, it offers practices and theory that can support cultural organizing in social justice movements. This presentation will begin and end by inviting participants in a song circle. It will specifically examine Linklater technique and examples of cultural organizing from the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1960s and today. Contemporary examples will include Songs in the Key of Resistance, a national network of song leaders engaged in various frontlines of organizing such as the Free Families Campaign to end family separation, detention, and deportation. This presentation will focus on the use of song as a tool for community building, political education, and creating transformative cultural work as we build upon ancestral legacies, lift up examples of courage in the present, and sing our way towards the liberated future we deserve.

VASTA was formed five years after her death, yet Edith Skinner’s work and methods remain debated, and by some teachers, even feared. Although the standard of speech training for decades, modern criticisms rightly spring from the prescriptiveness of the teaching tactics, which allowed little deviance from a white Standard American dialect. Harm could result by insisting that students abandon their personal communication story in favor of a Eurocentric euphony rather than a multi- cultural cacophony. This workshop will utilize modern sensibilities while embracing the rich material collected over four generations and codified by Timothy Monich and Lilene Mansell in Speak with Distinction. The presenters represent diversity of race and gender but symmetry of training. Our Skinner teacher, Susan Sweeney, gave us a springboard for vibrant choices through onomatopoetic joy, rhetorical opportunities of length and logic, and an awareness of our own speech story. Our approach is constructivist, meeting the young actor where they are, learning where they want to go, and giving them the tools to get there with ease, confidence, and the permission to return home as often as they like. The past supports the present and invents the future. It’s all good.

This is a presentation of research findings followed by discussion with attendees. This is a human research study approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB). The goal of the pedagogical research is to determine if voice cloning can be used to support student learning and performance of rhetorically dense language.

The study first established a baseline of auditory perception of prosodic features of syntax. Then students compared the first reading of a dense text by a peer and compared that to a commercial clone’s “performance” of the same text. After traditional instruction of the material, students tested whether a commercial clone could enhance their ability to recognize structures on the page or help them to hear the subtleties of prosody, or both.

After teaching the ways we understand a progression of ideas and urgency in spoken communication, we then tested a clone’s ability to “perform” these features. Finally, students who had consented cloned their own voices to see if, in essence, they could become their own best instructional aid.

The relevance is that studying AI voice cloning in detail keeps us from being behind the curve of technology and the worst abuses of the marketplace.

As the digital landscape shifts, voice and speech practitioners face a critical crossroads: do we compete with the “perfect” clarity of AI, or do we double down on the messy, glorious individuality of the human breath? This workshop, “The Ghost in the Machine: Protecting the Individual Voice in the Age of AI,” directly addresses the widening gaps in our field—specifically the rise of AI-driven performance and the modern trend toward “assembly line” vocal training that neglects the specific physical needs of the individual student.

We will explore the phenomena on the immediate horizon, such as actors performing alongside digital avatars and the psychological strain of vocalizing without a human scene partner. By moving away from a “vocal mechanic” mindset and toward being “presence coaches,” we can reclaim the vulnerability that algorithms cannot replicate.

Authenticity is *the* present-day buzz word around accent performance: everyone wants to give an authentic performance while hitting their accent targets! But authenticity is dynamic and subjective — who decides if an accent is authentic, how do they make that assessment, and when does the assessment happen?

Learn, explore, and apply theory about the process of authentication to your accentwork practice. We will define authentication compared to authenticity, explore authentication as a ‘tactic’ listeners deploy, and apply authentication to the accentwork process itself.

In line with the VASTA 2026 Conference theme, Changemakers, this workshop is focused on a present-day challenge and trend in accentwork that can be explored with new perspectives! We will explore a novel blend of theory from linguistic anthropology with praxis from accentwork which can influence how we select source speakers for our accent samples and how we respond to evaluation of our work at the end of the accentwork process.

The prevalence of voice and text specialists on artistic teams that create live theatre, especially in the U.S., has been dwindling for years. The most common rationales for not including voice professionals in the creative process include: 1) there’s no budget, 2) the director can take care of it / we’re not doing dialects / we have mics, 3) it’s the actor’s job. While some of these rationales may be true, we believe it’s time for a change! It’s time to reprioritize the human voice, support artists doing their best work (safely and effectively), and lift-up the necessity for all of us to be more present, clear and audible when delivering fully embodied stories and/or inciting societal change. De-prioritizing voice work in the theatre, and elsewhere, will undermine the inherent revolutionary impacts of our work and craft. We can make live theatre without lighting, props, sets, and costumes. But, we cannot make live theatre without the actor and the voice (signing communication, aside). It’s time for voice professionals to lead the change to get us back to the basics of the art form — lifting-up the human voice no matter the cost.

Hello ! I am just beginning to explore these ideas with my students. Recently I had a challenging health diagnosis and a deep personal loss . Someone sent me the book “Awe, The New Science of Everyday Wonder ” , by Dacher Keltner – I am using some of the principles to work with my students as we approach embracing big ideas, bigger range , ,and freer fuller sound, especially around the breath coming in and the sound flowing out.. Through the use of memory and imagination around what Drachner calls ‘the eight wonders of life ” , we are having a delightful time letting the freedom find us. This is a new idea and I will develop it more in the coming months but I would be excited to share the exercise. I feel this connects to VASTA 2026 ideas for the future – the new developments in the science of empathy , connection , and compassion as a way to relax and release the body the voice, and the individual .

As production timelines shrink, voice and speech practitioners require tools that bridge the gap between rigorous analysis and the rapid-fire demands of the industry. This 15-minute mini-session introduces AccentSleuth.com, a suite of digital tools designed to automate the “heavy lifting” of speech prep while maintaining specificity.

We will demonstrate how WordSleuth, TextSleuth, and VideoSleuth function as a cohesive ecosystem for the modern coach. Rather than manually scanning scripts for specific lexical sets, TextSleuth allows for instantaneous mapping of phonemic incidence across an entire text. We will also explore how VideoSleuth can be used to isolate target sounds within primary source footage, providing a secure foundation for auditory and physical embodiment.

The goal of this session is to show how automated analysis can remove the friction of manual scoring and scrubbing. By streamlining the technical prep, practitioners can dedicate more time to the nuanced, artistic collaboration that happens in the room. Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of how to integrate these digital tools into their existing pedagogy to increase both efficiency and precision in their accent work.

The aim is to carry out a narrative exercise in which a short story can be experienced by observing diverse discursive positions in relation to the facts or situations narrated. The narrator is assumed, for example, to position themselves favorably towards a particular character or critically based on their attitudes. They may agree or disagree with the narrated event, among countless other forms of interaction with what is narrated. The idea of the workshop would be to make explicit the relevance and practice various discursive positions in narrative performances.

It is observed that we tend towards abstraction when dealing with the word in performance, clinging with a certain emphasis to the meaning of verbal language in the textual materials used for performance. This seems to me a way of distancing ourselves from the various concrete and affective dimensions that can be actualized in a narrative or poem, for example. Exercising discursive dimensions in a narrative has helped bring students closer to the dialogical and relational dimensions of speech on stage.

Thus, this proposal engages with the focal point The Present within the context of the theme “Changemaker 40”.

The Lessac Kinesensic approach prioritizes embodied learning and awareness, centering the “teacher within”. Participants are invited to engage in a “3 step, self-teaching process” focusing on the use of consonant sounds. This process yields time to feel the consonant “instruments”, isolate them and then carry forward into speech and singing. Plus, it develops familiarity with text and awareness of where one typically leaves out some sounds. It’s a WONDERFUL way to learn (memorize) text in a non-habitual way. This is a tried and true practice that works! Participants are invited to bring 1 line of text in any language(s) of their choosing.

AI’s judgments about voice and speech are affecting lives and careers. Independent of questions about the nature of consciousness, and despite the clear threat AI poses to our cognitive abilities and livelihoods, this technology is here to stay. Businesses, organizations, and individuals are relying on these tools in an ever-increasing number of contexts. They are being used, at scale, for the evaluation and policing of voice, speech, and language—for hiring, promotion, compensation, and career development.

Generative AIs are averaging machines. They disregard variation as noise and systematically seek the majority view or usage. This approach is fundamentally at odds with the essential nature of language, and promises to cause profound societal harm. Linguistic variation—and the constant linguistic change that it gives rise to—is the very fabric of language. Language, the most human of all human inventions, does not exist independent of social variation.

As experts in embodied voice and speech, individual variation, and the vital connections between voice, accent, identity, and our underlying humanity, it falls to us to raise the alarm. This talk will outline the nature and scale of the problem facing us, and issue a call to arms.

This 55-minute workshop introduces techniques from Vocal Combat Technique to help activists, performers, and changemakers project their voices safely during calling, yelling, protests, rallies, and high-intensity speaking. Scaffolding the pathway to endurance and assurance of being heard, participants will be led through the following:

–Warm up utilizing SOVT techniques
–Breath and rib control exercises (buoyant breath and ‘yawn’ posturing) to build awareness of breath volume, pressure, and efficient resets.
–SOVT application in isolating and then intentionally integrating pitch arc, rhythm, and breath pressure
–Play with physical cues—anchoring, gesture, and grounded posture—to help participants coordinate breath support and vocal release.
–Command calls and protest-style phrases ( “Make Love Not War!”…””My neck! My back! These policies are wack!”) focus on clarity, projection, and sustainable airflow
—Target practice of longer rally calls and implementation of vocal resets to reinforce healthy habits for sustained vocal activism

An essential cool down will leave folks ready for a day’s work at the conference, on the picket line, or advocating in respective life sessions! VCT is a pedagogy that supports and advocates for the physical and mental demands of performers, making significant changes across industries of performing artists and into the world beyond.

This workshop explores how stage performance transforms with biological age and artistic maturity, reframing aging not as decline but as a deepening of expressive resources. As actors progress through decades of practice, their interpretive intelligence, emotional precision, and presence often expand, while physiological changes in voice, breath, and mobility require conscious adaptation.

We aim to research how performers can cultivate the additional skills necessary for longevity and well-being on stage. We seek to identify and propose exercises that enhance balance, integrate biohacking-informed tools, and apply myofascial techniques, all aimed at supporting the evolving voice–body system. Through these approaches, the goal is to sustain adaptability, efficiency, and expressive capacity, enabling actors to continue performing at the highest possible level as their voice and body mature.

A key focus is the emergence of interconnected voice–body practices, viewing the voice as part of a global system of tension, support, and resonance. We integrate breath, myofascial release, alignment, and proprioception to support freer sound and reduce compensatory effort for long-term vocal and physical health.

Integrating neurocognitive insights, the workshop is a part of a research that aims for seeking a long-term training model that bridges voice science, motor learning, and embodied cognition.