Linklater Warmups for Actors: Where to Start

Kristin Linklater's premise, distilled, is that you were not born with a small, tight, breathy, or pushed voice. You were born with a voice. Everything else came later. Some of it was useful. Some of it is now in the way. The work, in her phrase, is freeing the natural voice: removing the patterns of held tension and habituated effort that sit between you and the sound that is already there.

This is different from the voice work that asks you to do more. Linklater's work, at the start, asks you to do less. To stop pushing. To stop placing. To stop performing the production of sound. The voice is going to come up on its own once the body lets it.

That is the philosophical claim. The exercises are concrete.

The principles you can feel

There are a few ideas that show up in almost every Linklater exercise.

The breath drops into the body. It does not get pulled in. You release the belly and the air arrives. You release the diaphragm and the air leaves. Active inhale is a sign that something is still holding.

The sound is on the breath. You do not push sound out. You let the breath carry the sound. If you are working harder than the breath, the sound will be tight even when it is loud.

The body is the resonating chamber, not the throat. The vibration belongs in the chest, the mask, the bones of the face, and eventually the whole body. The throat is a passage. It is not a place where the sound should sit.

These principles are why so much Linklater work happens on the floor. Gravity removes the temptation to support the breath with held muscles. The floor catches the body so the body can stop catching itself.

Three exercises to start with

These are simplified for solo use. Linklater's full work belongs in a room with a teacher; what is below is enough to get the feel of it.

1. Releasing the breath

Lie on your back. Knees bent, feet flat on the floor. Hand on your belly.

Notice the breath without changing it. Three or four cycles. Then, on the next exhale, let the belly drop completely. Empty. On the inhale, do not pull. Wait. The breath will arrive on its own when the body needs it.

Do this for one to two minutes. The point is to relearn the feeling of breath that is not chased. Almost every habituated tension in the throat is a downstream effect of a breath that is being recruited rather than released.

2. The sound channel

Still on the floor. Add a sigh of relief on the exhale. Not a long ahhh. A short, released huh on the breath that was already leaving.

Do not push the sound. Do not place it. Do not adjust the pitch. Just let the released breath have a sound on it, the way a relieved sigh does after good news. Three or four breaths in, the sound will start to settle into a pitch that is honestly yours. That pitch is closer to your real speaking voice than what you sit in when you are trying to sound a certain way.

This is the start of what Linklater calls the channel. The open passage through which sound is released rather than produced.

3. Touch of sound

Sit up, or stand if you are warm enough. Take a small breath. Make the smallest possible huh on the exhale. Almost inaudible. Then a slightly bigger one. Then one that is just speaking volume. Then one that is room volume. The size of the sound scales but the effort should not.

If the sound starts to feel pushed at room volume, you have left the channel and gone back to producing. Drop back down to the small sound, find the easy production, and climb the ladder again.

This exercise is the one that translates most directly to the moment you start a take. The first line should arrive on a released breath with a touch of sound on it, not on a held push.

How this differs from Berry

Both Linklater and Berry care deeply about freedom in the voice. They locate the freedom in different places.

Linklater works from the body inward to the text. Release the body, the breath arrives, the sound arrives, then the words can ride on it. The text is the last thing to come into the picture.

Berry works from the text outward to the body. The text is muscular and active from the first second. You discover what the language is asking the body to do by speaking it with full attention to its physicality. Full piece on her approach in the Berry entry.

Both are right. They sit at different angles to the same job. Many working actors use Linklater to undo tension when they are walking into the day clenched, and Berry once they are inside the text and need to find the muscular life of it.

When to use this tradition

Use Linklater on days the body is locked. Long flights. Stress weeks. Mornings after a heavy show. Times when no amount of effort is getting the voice open because effort is the actual problem.

It is also the right place to start if you have never had voice training and you do not know what your natural voice sounds like in the first place. You are looking for the sound that exists on the breath when you stop arranging it. Floor work, sighs of relief, and the small huh are enough to start finding it.

What you do with that voice once it is open belongs to other traditions. Linklater opens the door. The text walks through.