Tag: barcelona

“The Voice” w/ Stand Up Europe

At the end of this month, I’ll be headed to Lisbon for Stand Up Europe‘s next Comedy Festival. And while it will surely be a weekend full of jokes, drinking, and classic comedic tomfoolery, this time I’m there to work!

I’ll be leading one of the several workshops the festival offers, focusing on an essential tool for every comedian: the Voice.

As comedians, we’re ultimately story tellers – just funny story tellers. Our instrument? The body and, maybe even more importantly, the voice.
A good comedian has good jokes, true, but good jokes still need good delivery. There are several key elements to the voice, and control of all them is essential. Volume, speed, pitch, inflection, and diction are all necessary tools of the comedian and all of these begin in the body itself. Beginning with posture and breath-work, we’ll build our voices back up again from scratch before learning to manipulate them in order to create characters, convey tone, and be understood.
Non-semantic cues such as pauses and inflection are crucial in engaging your audience but especially so when both performers and audiences are operating in a second, third, or even fourth language. When you’re working outside your mother language, you have a lot working against you, don’t let intelligibility get in your way! Learning to tell a story with not just words, but with voice, will enhance any comedian’s ability to land the joke, get the laugh, and tell their story onstage.

I’m always happy to be back with the team at Stand Up Europe as I’ve attended their festival as a participant twice before, on location in Frankfurt and Prague last year. A small team, they have built an incredible community of comedians from all across Europe and the world. Every workshop and mic is a friendly, encouraging, fun space to tell your favorite jokes and try new ones. Not to mention to meet a whole bunch of other artists and subsequently make a bunch of new friends!

Artists stick together. And upon planning a European tour, my friend and I (another comic) realized that out of 35 cities, we knew performers and show runners in 30 of them. When I last traveled – to Vienna – I applied for open mics before a friend of mine from the festival asked if I wanted a showcase spot. I said absolutely! He asked if I had 10-15 minutes which I did, then with a couple taps of his phone and a few minutes later he responded, “You’ve got 15min on Tuesday.” I had another comic here in Barcelona put me on his show despite never having seen me perform, just trusting that I knew what I was doing. These are the kind of connections that these festivals foster and these are the kind of connections both business and friendship that everybody needs.

Coming Home

Left: a headshot taken my third year in uni (2019-20); Right: a headshot taken under a lighting grid I designed and installed (2025)

It’s been over 5 years since I’ve walked onstage as someone other than myself.

After a two and half year hiatus after uni, I began my stand-up career and returned to the stage as an improviser, musician, and vocalist. But I had yet to add traditional acting back into the mix…until today.
Today I take the stage in my original piece, Where We Die; a piece I’ve spent the last three months as director, dramaturg, and lighting designer. But tonight I’ll step into the role of Sophie, a broken young girl from America who has lost more than her sister in the last five years. Now she finds herself among strangers, and we’ll see if in them, she can find herself.

I feel somewhere between anxiety and pride to be stepping back under the lights. I’m grateful to be joined by five other incredible, hard-working cast members. And while I’m excited to get to play, I’m nervous to “put my money where my mouth is” as it were; with minimal rehearsals yet speaking the words I, myself, wrote, a pressure weighs on me to be more than good.

But this is what I’ve been trained to do. Beginning at the age of eight, I’ve been in countless productions of drama, comedy, varying lengths and intensities, some with song and dance, some with puppetry and movement. I’ve almost two decades of stage time with the years between age 13 and 21 being the most intense, doing 2-6 productions every year complete with rehearsal, memorization, and of course, performances. I know what to do when something goes wrong, when you miss a line, when you get lost. This, too, is a play I know intimately as it was birthed from my own brain, the characters splinters of myself.

I have no idea what awaits me onstage tonight, but I know that the curtain will rise, and it will fall.