Linklater Voice Work for Actors: What It Is and How to Start

Your voice teacher keeps saying “let it drop in.” Your director says you sound “held.” You’ve been told your voice is fine in the car and tight on stage, and nobody can tell you what to do about it, except breathe, which you thought you were already doing.

If your training mentions Linklater, this is the problem it was built for. Kristin Linklater’s idea was that actors don’t need a new voice. They need to stop doing the things that get in the way of the one they have.

The short version: Linklater work starts with the body and tension, then breath, then vibration and resonance, then the channel (jaw, tongue, throat, soft palate), then breath capacity and range, and only then articulation and text. It’s slow on purpose. You can start alone with a gentle routine in that same order, as long as you go easy and treat it as noticing, not forcing.

Who Kristin Linklater was

Linklater trained with Iris Warren at LAMDA in London, and studied movement there with Trish Arnold. A tribute in American Theatre, written by her colleague Andrea Haring and her son Hamish Linklater, says Warren worked from the inside out rather than the outside in. Warren’s constant emphasis, the tribute says, was “I want to hear you, not your voice.”

Her book Freeing the Natural Voice came out in 1976, followed by Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice in 1992. In 1978 she co-founded Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, with the director Tina Packer and Dennis Krausnick, as the tribute records; the publisher Routledge’s page on the company’s history names her and Packer as founders. She died on June 5, 2020.

Her work is still taught by teachers who carry the title Designated Linklater Teacher. Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble, for example, asks for training with a Designated Linklater Teacher, or its own first course, before its second-level class.

The idea: free the voice you have

A lot of voice advice adds things: a placement, a projection trick, a way to pronounce a vowel. Linklater’s starting point runs the other way. Her publisher, Nick Hern Books, describes the aim as liberating the voice you have rather than applying vocal techniques from the outside. The book assumes everyone has a voice that can express whatever emotion, mood, or thought they experience.

What stops it, in this view, is habitual tension: the clenched jaw, the held belly, the shoulders that rise when you’re nervous. The Linklater Center says the work seeks to undo habitual tensions that inhibit expression. On stage, those habits squeeze the sound and cut the voice off from what you feel.

Describing her training with Warren, Linklater wrote that progress lay in the answer to the question “How does it feel?” rather than “How does it sound?”, as the American Theatre tribute quotes her. That’s a useful switch for any actor. If you’re listening to yourself, you’re outside the scene. If you’re feeling the vibration and the thought, you’re in it.

The progression, step by step

The work comes in a set order, which teachers call the progression. The Linklater Center’s page lays it out, loosely, in seven stages. Here they are in plain words:

1. Become aware of the body and soften the habitual tensions that trap energy.
2. Release the breathing muscles, so sound vibrations can be released economically and directly.
3. Free the first vibrations of sound and build resonance with humming, feeling the vibration spread through the body.
4. Undo tension in the jaw, throat, and tongue, and wake up the soft palate.
5. Increase breath capacity and liveliness, to prepare for higher energy and more intense moments.
6. Strengthen the full range by tuning into the resonators in the body, toward a free range the Center describes as three to four octaves.
7. Wake up clear articulation and a deeply felt connection to the text.

Notice where text comes: last. That’s not because words don’t matter. Our reading: a voice that’s still held tends to grip the words too, so it makes sense to open the channel before you ask it to carry Shakespeare.

Some classes split the progression in two. Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble runs a first course on releasing tension and connecting to breath, vibration, and intention, and a second on range, power, articulation, and clarity of thought, open to people who’ve done the first or trained with a Designated Linklater Teacher. Shakespeare & Company describes its second-half class as building on the relaxation and “generous vibration” of the first, then isolating and blending the resonators.

How it differs from other voice work

You’ll meet other approaches in training, and the honest answer is that good teachers borrow from each other. But a few things mark Linklater work out.

• It subtracts before it adds. The early stages are about letting go of effort, not building a new skill.
• It pays attention to feeling over sound. You track sensation, vibration, and impulse, not how pretty the result is.
• It ties voice to imagination. The American Theatre tribute says she met Tina Packer in 1974 and developed a series of exercises called Sound and Movement, to help actors respond to images so words feel like experience rather than information.
• It’s sequential: range work comes after the release, breath, and resonance stages.

If you’ve worked on the Alexander Technique, you may find overlap: both start with noticing the habit before you try to change it. Our guide to the Alexander Technique for actors covers that side.

A gentle routine to start tonight

A book or a weekend workshop isn’t the same as a teacher who can watch you, and you shouldn’t try to learn the whole progression from an article. What you can do alone is a short, easy routine that samples the first stages in the same order and ends with one easy line as a taste of text work. The middle stages, building breath capacity and range, are for working with a teacher. Do it with curiosity, never strain.

Release (about 4 minutes)

Stand with your feet under your hips. Let your head drop forward and roll slowly down through your spine until you’re hanging, knees soft. Hang for a few breaths. Let your arms and neck be heavy. Then roll up slowly, stacking the spine, and let your head float up last. Notice what tightened on the way up: shoulders, belly, jaw. That’s your habit, and noticing it is the first step.

Breath (about 3 minutes)

Lie down or stand easily. Don’t take a big breath. Let the breath out on a silent, relieved sigh, then wait. Let the next breath arrive on its own, without pulling it in. Do this a handful of times. You’re looking for the moment when the belly lets go and the breath drops in low, without effort.

Vibration (about 4 minutes)

On an easy breath out, let a soft hum come, lips closed, teeth apart. Keep it low in your range and quiet. Put a hand on your chest and feel it buzz. Then open the hum into a sighed “huh” and let the sound fall out of you, the way you’d sigh with relief. No pushing for volume. The goal is the feeling of vibration, not a big sound.

Channel and text (about 4 minutes)

Let your jaw hang open, then gently move it with your hands, letting it be heavy. Stretch the tongue forward and let it relax back. Yawn, and notice the lift at the back of the mouth. Then say a single line, slowly, on a free breath. Shakespeare’s Hamlet gives the players the right note, from the Project Gutenberg text:

Hamlet: Speak the speech, I pray you ... trippingly on the tongue.

Say it once pushed, the way you might in an audition. Then let the breath drop in, feel the hum in your chest, and say it again easily, letting the words be light on the tongue. A moment later in the same speech he warns, “Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently.” Ease, not effort, is the instruction in both lines.

Bring it into a scene

The trap with voice work is that it stays in the warm-up. You feel open in the studio, then the scene starts and the jaw clamps again, because now you’re thinking about the next line. The fix is to practice the release inside actual dialogue, with someone speaking to you, so the freer voice becomes the one you act with.

That’s easier when the lines are secure. If you’re still hunting for the words, you’ll grip. Get them solid first, then use rehearsal to notice tension. Offbook reads the other parts and waits for you, and you can add a pause before a line and set how fast the other parts are read, as the video below shows. That gives you room to let the breath drop in before you answer.

Try this on a short scene. Run it once as you normally would. Then run it again, and at every cue, let the breath come in low before you speak. Don’t make it a big pause in performance; this is rehearsal, and you’re teaching your body a new habit. If you want to get the words in first, our free first-letter memorizer turns your lines into cues, and you’ll find classic speeches to practice on in our monologue library.

Look after the instrument

Release work is gentle, but your voice still needs basic care. The US National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders recommends drinking plenty of water, avoiding extremes like screaming or whispering, and taking “vocal naps” through the day. It also says that if you think you have a voice problem, see a doctor to find the cause.

For the practical side of filling a big theater, see our guide to projecting your voice on stage, and for running out of air mid-speech, breath control for long speeches.

Questions actors ask

What is the Linklater technique?

A voice training method developed by Kristin Linklater and set out in Freeing the Natural Voice. It aims to undo habitual tension so the voice connects freely to breath, feeling, and thought, working in a set order from body awareness to breath, vibration and resonance, the channel (jaw, tongue, throat), breath capacity, range, and finally articulation and text.

Can I learn Linklater from the book alone?

You can start with it. But the work depends on noticing habits you can’t see in yourself, so a Designated Linklater Teacher or a drama school class will take you much further. Use solo work as a supplement, and go gently.

How long does it take?

There’s no fixed timeline. The progression is meant to be repeated and deepened, and some courses split it in two. Treat it as an ongoing practice, like a warm-up you keep refining, rather than a course you finish.

Is Linklater only for Shakespeare?

No. Linklater wrote a separate book on Shakespeare and co-founded a Shakespeare company, but the goal of a free, connected voice applies to any play, a screen audition, or a self-tape. In our view, a held voice shows on camera too.