How do we begin creating an embodied, resonant performance of a text – one that invites a heartfelt connection between storyteller and listener?
Through an intimate, sensory exploration of a story’s words and themes, its characters and their relationships, the storyteller draws the story closer to the personal, forming a profound bond between story and storyteller. Within this powerfully vulnerable connection to text we can meet our audience heart-to-heart, inviting each listener to not just hear the stories we tell, but to feel them, too.
Through gentle inquiry and exploration, this workshop will invite the storyteller to encounter and investigate text in a way that reaches a deeper kind of telling.
Rae Ellen Bodie received her initial actor training from the University of Calgary, and received an MFA-Acting and Graduate Diploma in Voice Teaching from York University, graduating at the top of her class.
Rae Ellen quickly established herself in Toronto’s Film & TV scene as a sought-after acting and dialogue/dialect coach. Over 20+ years, Rae Ellen has coached for Disney, NBC Universal, CBC, CW, Syfy, Lionsgate and Nickelodeon, among others. On and off-set, Rae Ellen has coached a line-up of performers that includes Rachel McAdams, Tatiana Maslany, Scott Speedman, Devery Jacobs, James Purefoy and Clive Standen. She has coached hundreds of actors: in York’s undergrad conservatory, at Toronto’s renowned Professional Actors Lab, and at the Canadian Film Centre, where she served for a dozen years as voice mentor in the CFC’s distinguished Actors Conservatory.
In addition to her work with actors, Rae Ellen has also coached and trained athletes, singers, storytellers, dancers, painters, public servants and poets, including Elvis Stojko (Olympic figure skater), Jean Stilwell (opera singer), Paul Manly (former NDP Party MP), and Rupi Kaur (poet). Over many years Rae also served as performance coach for members of public service union SEIU Local 1000 in Northern California, where she coached former president Yvonne Walker and her team of Officers.
Since moving back to her birth province of BC, Rae has continued to coach and train actors and public speakers of all kinds, while expanding her practice into writing and mindfulness instruction.
(A workshop of the Network of Biblical Storytellers of Canada)