Here, exercise and strengthen the muscles we use in shaping words, an important practice for clear expression in both professional and everyday life. After warming up the breath and voice, work out your vocal articulators using combinations of consonants and vowel sounds, followed by practice phrases and tongue twisters for enunciation and clarity.

Now learn an effective system for clarifying and connecting with your purpose onstage, or in front of any audience. Using the characters of Blanche and Stanley from Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, explore acting teacher Uta Hagen's "Nine Questions," which elucidate a character's identity, given circumstances, and motivations.

Now study the tools that make speech clear and energized. Consider how vowels carry the feeling behind words, and practice clearly pronouncing our language's 20 vowel sounds, including pure vowels and diphthongs. Continue with consonants, both plosives and continuants, building awareness of how consonants communicate meaning and create emphasis.

What makes a voice expressive or lackluster, rich or strident? Explore the parameters of resonance (sound placement), pitch, and volume. Understand how they give your voice its overall quality, and experiment with altering them at will. Also delve into inflection and intonation, see how they convey meaning, and learn about vocal projection.

How do our movements and gestures communicate our purpose? Study how our interactions with others are governed by our status or power position within the relationship. In life and onstage, observe how we "play" status with others through specific physical tactics, stances, and gestures that convey our intentions and further our objectives.

Learn to keep your audience engaged using the rhythms of speech. Begin by studying pace, how vocal pace affects listeners, and how variety of pace aids clarity and communication. Then learn about phrasing - how you group words and punctuate your speech with pauses - and ways to improve phrasing and change limiting speech habits.

Conclude by contemplating what great performers do, and how presence can be a way of life. Consider how master performers engage and question the world by reflecting what they see, telling the truth, taking risks, transforming what they receive from others into something new, and finding what gives them the greatest joy.

Balance is a state of equilibrium produced by an even distribution of weight, through which we can direct our energy in the most effective ways. Begin to balance the body in a lying position, practicing small movements that create release in the connective tissue of the shoulders, hips, and joints.

“When I die,” George Balanchine stated in his most apocalyptic utterance, “everything should vanish.” The artist did not expect his ballets to survive, and if it were up to him, they would no longer be seen and yet his dances are being staged more often than ever, abetted by the tireless efforts of his followers. Though he passed away in 1983, Balanchine’s works have been kept alive through the Balanchine Trust, established in 1987, through...

Shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, this non-fiction musical follows composer John Wallowitch, a star of New York cabaret and partner Bertram Ross, Martha Graham's lead dancer for 20 years and co-director of the Graham Company. Together they formed the beloved musical duo "Wallowitch and Ross,” as well as an unshakable partnership, both onstage and off.