Fitzmaurice Voicework for Actors: Tremoring, Destructuring, and Restructuring

You walk into a voice class and the teacher guides you into a stretch on the floor. A minute later your legs start to shake. Nobody told you to shake them. Then the teacher asks you to let a sound out on every breath, however it comes.

That’s a typical first impression of Fitzmaurice Voicework, and it puzzles a lot of actors. Shaking legs, sighing sounds, and then, often the next day, very precise work on the ribs and belly. What does any of that have to do with saying a speech well?

The short version: Catherine Fitzmaurice built her method in two halves. Destructuring uses an involuntary tremor and sound on the out-breath to loosen habitual holding, so breathing becomes spontaneous. Restructuring then adds a deliberate technique, a swing of the lower ribs and support from the abdomen, so you can choose your timing and volume without losing that spontaneity. Text comes in once both are working. The tremor part should be learned from a certified teacher, and this guide explains why.

Who Catherine Fitzmaurice is

Fitzmaurice trained for three years at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. In her essay “Breathing is Meaning”, published in The Vocal Vision (Applause Books, 1997), she writes that as a child she studied with Barbara Bunch, Cicely Berry’s teacher, and that her teachers at Central included Gwyneth Thurburn, J. Clifford Turner, and Berry. She taught there before moving to the United States in 1968.

The Fitzmaurice Voice Institute’s founder page says she has taught voice and text at the Yale School of Drama, Harvard/A.R.T./MXAT, and the Juilliard School’s Drama Division, among other schools. With Michael Morgan she co-wrote Fitzmaurice Voicework: Embodying the Holistic Voice, published by Routledge.

Her method came out of a teaching problem. In the same essay she says most of her students, in both countries, couldn’t isolate the rib swing and abdominal support that classical voice training asked for without adding tension. Rather than drop technique, she looked for faster ways to reduce body tension first, drawing on Bioenergetics, yoga, and shiatsu. That search became Destructuring.

The Institute’s homepage describes Fitzmaurice Voicework as training that unites body, breath, imagination, and voice for communication. Its overview page says it supports speaking for performance, public speaking, singing, and voice with movement. Fitzmaurice Voicework, Tremorwork, and Destructuring/Restructuring are registered trademarks of the Institute.

Destructuring: the tremor and the out-breath

This is the part people talk about. The Institute’s Tremorwork page explains that students take positions, such as a dorsal stretch, that stretch a muscle partway, to a point where it can’t hold its place, so it begins to shake by itself. The shaking is involuntary, like shivering.

That last word matters. In a 2010 American Theatre interview with Paul Meier, Fitzmaurice calls tremoring a naturally occurring reflex, “quite different from intentional shaking.” She points to the same reflex under cold, anger, or fatigue. In an interview with the coach Saul Kotzubei, she puts it plainly: “it’s not an intentional shaking.”

Why tremor at all? In “Breathing is Meaning,” she explains that the tremor is induced at first through the extremities only. That leaves the torso free to respond with a heightened breathing pattern. In other words, the legs or arms do the shaking, and the belly and ribs are left alone to breathe however they need to.

Then comes sound. Her adaptation, she writes, uses sound on every out-breath, “no matter how the body is breathing,” without changing the placement or rhythm of the breath. The sounds tend to be soft, “fluffy,” and released. The goal isn’t a beautiful tone. It’s getting the breath impulse and the voice to arrive together.

Kotzubei’s interview records her definition of the whole first half: Destructuring involves “reducing excess bodily tension, specifically around the breathing process.” In the American Theatre piece she describes it as getting rid of what’s familiar and habitual. If you’ve ever been told your voice sounds held, this is the stage that goes after the holding.

Why you need a teacher for this part

Tremoring is not something to learn from an article, and this one won’t describe the positions step by step. The Institute describes the positions as customized, and its overview says Destructuring includes hands-on work. Fitzmaurice also writes that the release work is sometimes physically or emotionally painful, and that the journey is long and often frustrating.

A teacher can see whether you’re shaking because the reflex has kicked in or because you’re forcing it, which defeats the purpose. They can adjust your position, pace a session, and help you come out of it. In Kotzubei’s interview, she calls the work “self-regulatory” and encourages home practice between classes. Home practice makes sense once a teacher has shown you how.

Restructuring: technique without losing spontaneity

Here’s where Fitzmaurice parts company with the idea that relaxation alone is enough. Once the breathing muscles are less inhibited, she writes, it becomes easy to bring back the traditional breathing technique she learned in London. Kotzubei’s interview has her describing Restructuring as learning to breathe “in the most physiologically efficient way” to support the voice without losing spontaneity.

Concretely, “Breathing is Meaning” names two actions. On the in-breath, the work expands the lower third of the ribcage, where the lungs are largest, bringing in as much air as each phrase needs. On the out-breath, an abdominal support movement becomes the vocal action, instead of a squeeze of the ribs or tension in the neck. In American Theatre she calls the engagement of the intercostals and the transverse abdominal muscle “the one essential” she uses.

Two cautions run through her description. First, actors need to trust their right to pause and breathe in when a new thought arrives, so the upper chest, shoulders, and neck don’t tense. Second, she always works Restructuring with speech sounds, nonsense, impromptu speaking, and later text, because, as she puts it, there’s no need to control breathing if you aren’t using the voice.

Restructuring, she writes, gives the actor control over the timing and variety of pitch, rate, volume, and tone, with approximate repeatability. In our reading, that’s the practical payoff: you can do the scene the same way on Tuesday and Saturday without it going stale.

The focus line

The last piece is an image. Fitzmaurice encourages actors to stop monitoring their breath and articulators and instead picture a focus line, traveling from the abdominal action on the out-breath around the pelvis, up the spine, and out from the “third eye” area. The point is to engage fully in what she calls meaningful communication with another person, which, she adds, involves receiving as much as sending. Kotzubei’s interview sums it up: Restructuring is “a combination of imaging, breath, and intention.”

What a week of training looks like

If you take a workshop, you’ll likely meet the work in a set order. The Institute’s five-day intensive lays it out this way:

1. Day one, Destructuring: releasing habitual tension through tremoring and somatic awareness.
2. Day two, Restructuring: rebuilding breath support and vocal connection from the ground up.
3. Day three, Text: bringing language alive with the newly freed instrument.
4. Day four, Speech: putting breath, resonance, and articulation together in spoken expression.
5. Day five, Singing: bringing everything together, including presence and meaning.

The Institute says each day gives about six hours to one area, in the same order used in its certification training, and the intensive is open to performers, voice practitioners, educators, and anyone else interested. For people who want to teach, the certification program is an intensive two-year course, with 60 hours of prior study as the base requirement for consideration. The Institute’s site has a teacher directory.

Fitzmaurice told American Theatre that her certified teachers work in conservatories and theater schools around the world, so ask your program, or check the directory, before you sign up for a workshop. A good first question for any teacher: what’s their certification, and how do they pace the tremor work for beginners?

Taking it into a speech

Fitzmaurice’s own phrase for the end point is that voice work becomes “indistinguishable from acting.” The breath stops being a technique you think about and becomes, as she writes, an automatic response to the need to communicate. Getting there means practicing with text, not just exercises.

Shakespeare gives you a neat test. Here’s King Henry before Harfleur, from the Project Gutenberg text of Henry V (Act 3, Scene 1):

King Henry: Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath, and bend up every spirit
To his full height.

Henry is telling his soldiers to clench, hold, and brace, which is almost exactly what Destructuring tries to undo. The trap is to do it yourself: lock the jaw, hold the breath, and push the line out. You’ll get noise, not rally.

A Restructuring approach, as Fitzmaurice describes it, would let each new thought bring its own breath. There’s a fresh thought at “Hold hard,” and another at “and bend up.” Let the lower ribs widen as the thought arrives, and let the abdominal support carry the line out, toward the people Henry is talking to. The character can be tense. Your breath doesn’t have to be.

Try it twice. First as a shout. Then with a breath on each new thought, speaking to a real or imagined group of tired soldiers. Notice which version you could repeat eight shows a week. For more speeches to work on, our monologue library and public-domain plays are full of them, and our guide to breath control for long speeches covers where to breathe in a long passage.

Voice work also has to survive a scene partner. It’s easy to breathe well in a warm-up and grip again once someone is speaking to you and you’re hunting for your next line. Get the words secure first: our free tools include a line memorizer that turns your lines into first-letter cues. Then run the scene in Offbook, where realistic voices read the other parts and wait for your line. You can add custom pauses in the scene editor, which gives you room to let the breath come in on the new thought.

Fitzmaurice and Linklater, side by side

Actors often ask which is better. No source we found ranks one above the other. They’re different routes to a freer voice, and what the sources do say is how they relate.

• Both aim to free tension. Asked about this in American Theatre, Fitzmaurice said Kristin Linklater’s work is similar to hers in being, to a certain extent, interested in freeing tension and in the impact of breathing.
• They start in different places. In the same interview, Fitzmaurice says her work begins with breathing and sound-making in the reflexive state of tremoring, giving over to spontaneous behavior.
• Fitzmaurice brings back a defined breathing technique. Restructuring reintroduces the rib swing and abdominal support from the Central School tradition. Linklater’s progression, as we describe in our guide to Linklater voice work, moves through release, breath, vibration, the channel, range, and then text.
• Their roots differ. Linklater trained with Iris Warren at LAMDA; Fitzmaurice trained at Central and drew on Bioenergetics, yoga, and shiatsu.

If you’re choosing, the honest test is a class with a certified teacher of each. Your drama school may decide for you, and that’s fine. In our view, what matters most is a teacher who watches you closely, whichever method they teach.

What the evidence says

Be wary of anyone who promises results. The research on this method is thin. A 2016 University of Iowa master’s thesis by Brock Irvin Meadath, measuring six graduate student actors before and after a Fitzmaurice-based voice course, found no statistically significant results, which the author put down to the small sample. He also wrote that the method has “little more than anecdotal evidence” for its effect.

That’s not a reason to avoid it. Little actor training has been studied in trials; it’s usually judged by teachers and audiences. It’s a reason to treat Fitzmaurice Voicework as a training method you test in your own body, with a good teacher, and not as a fix for a voice problem. If you have hoarseness or pain that won’t go away, see a doctor. For the practical side of being heard in a big house, see our guide to projecting your voice on stage.

Questions actors ask

What is Fitzmaurice Voicework?

A voice training method created by Catherine Fitzmaurice. It has two halves: Destructuring, which uses an involuntary tremor and sound on the out-breath to release habitual tension around breathing, and Restructuring, which adds deliberate rib and abdominal support so you can control timing and volume while staying spontaneous. It’s then applied to text, speech, and singing.

What is destructuring and restructuring?

Destructuring is the release half: positions that let the muscles tremor on their own, with sound on every breath, so the breath becomes free and spontaneous. Restructuring is the technique half: expanding the lower ribs on the in-breath and using abdominal support on the out-breath, practiced with sounds, improvised speech, and text.

Is Fitzmaurice better than Linklater?

No source we found ranks one above the other. Both aim to free tension; Fitzmaurice starts from a reflexive tremor and then adds a defined breathing technique, while Linklater moves step by step through a set sequence from release to text. Try a class in each if you can and see which helps your voice.

Can I learn tremoring on my own?

Learn it from a certified Fitzmaurice teacher first. The positions are adjusted to each person, and a teacher can tell whether the tremor is a reflex or forced effort. Once you’ve been shown how, practicing at home between classes is part of the work.

How long does the training take?

You can get a first taste in a workshop or the Institute’s five-day intensive, which covers Destructuring, Restructuring, text, speech, and singing. Teaching the method takes a two-year certification program. It can become an ongoing warm-up practice rather than a course you finish.