Introduction:
Starting my journey here at Leeds Conservatoire, my only experience of training in musical theatre was on a foundation year at Emil Dale Academy. Leaving Emil Dale, I had improved so much and added greatly to my strengths, however leaving with much to be desired. After doing some research on one of Leeds Conservatoire’s Senior Lecturers, Victoria Gimby, I found this quote “It is more important now than ever before to have several strings to your bow” (Gimby, 2021). I was fortunate enough to work under her for a ‘Research and Development’ week, and I found this quote so inspiring every time she said it to us. Throughout this portfolio, I intend to demonstrate the achievements and improvements I have made from starting here at Leeds Conservatoire. Furthermore, how I aim to improve on my weaknesses, and strategies I will use to remain consistent in my development and reach my set goals (See PDP Template). I will showcase this by using videos, voice notes, pdfs and images as evidence of my development so that I can critically analyse my own progress using the ‘Boud Reflection Model, (1985).
Dance:
Fitness, strength and flexibility:
Fitness, strength and flexibility, all come hand in hand with each other, they are all a big part of musical theatre, singing and dancing on a stage, live and at the same time is tremendously difficult. I have had to work on all this year, and I am very proud of my fitness and stamina, please see ‘Body Conditioning reflection’ and ‘Dead Ringer and Newsies’ video to see where I started and finished the year with my fitness. On the other hand, my main issue of my dancing development this year was my flexibility. Throughout this year I have improved my flexibility but not as much as I would have liked to. Since this has been one of my main struggles, I made it one of my goals starting at the beginning of the year and making it a consistent goal through the semesters. After formative assessments in December, I had received the same feedback for both ballet and jazz which was my flexibility, further, that I am actively flexible but not passively. My goals and feedback can be seen in the ‘PDP Template’. My understanding of active flexibility is how much your body can stretch with a bit of momentum and force, whereas passive is how flexible you are using your own strength and weight in a stationary position. Please see ‘Active and passive flexibility’ for an example of the different types of flexibility as well as my end of year result of both. As seen in the video, the développé (my passive flexibility) only lets my leg go below the bar however, the Grand Battement (my active flexibility) goes above the bar. Throughout this year, we have had weekly body conditioning sessions, one focusing on stamina and strength and the other focusing on flexibility and endurance. In both we used dynamic stretches, meaning when stretching a muscle, you are going in and out of that stretch rather than using static stretches. Upon research into dynamic stretching, I found an article where Anne Rex DO said
“Dynamic stretching is a great addition to the warm-up process and pre-exercise routine.” (Cleveland Clinic, 2024).
These stretches allow your muscles to warm up with stretching, making them safer for your body as to not pull or overstretch a muscle. At the beginning of the year, I didn’t particularly like the endurance kind of body conditioning, due to my lack of flexibility and how the positions we used in the hour were very uncomfortable for me. This made me feel defeated and annoyed at myself for not being as flexible as others despite my sporting background and previous year of training. Although, throughout this year I have slowly but surely got more comfortable with the moves and positions, making me more confident. Through this year, I know where my body is lacking in strength and further, flexibility. I now know what kind of stretches I can do to improve alongside warm my body up before I do some physical activity.
Salsa Style and my findings:
One of our Jazz Repertoire dances was to Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, “The More we Dance” (Yazbek, 2005). The choreography adopted similarly to a Salsa style of dance which was a new style I’ve never approached before. Doing some research into Salsa Dancing (Gonzales, 2025), I found there to be seven main different styles of salsa dancing (please see Different Salsa dancing Styles). As this is one of the dances I have chosen to do for assessments, I wanted to do a bit of wider reading especially on the use of arms in the style of dance. I was able to find an example of Cuban/Casino style Salsa (Hanson, 2013), the difference between Cuban and New York style (Baila Productions Salsa Dance School, 2023) and also of Timba style Salsa (La Suerte Dance School, 2020). Some of these types of mainstream Salsa have nicknames and can relate to how they are performed. “Casino” – talking about Rueda de Casino, a group circular dance. This is an example and tutorial of a simple Rueda de Casino (La Suerte Dance School, 2021) “On1” and “On2” distinguishes when to finish a move called the break step. Puerto Rican widely known as “sabor” translating to flavour, referring to emotional and personal expression, creating a more individual dance experience. “Cali” is deemed as the Salsa Capital of the world, deriving from Cali, Columbia. Throughout all of these different styles, I found that the use of arms is very similar to each other when dancing solo and sadly would not influence me too much on how I actually would perform the choreography. When performing the routine, I try and adapt this circular movement with my arms but just in a more dramatic style (please see The More We Dance). Though it does beg the question about how musical theatre has appropriated a style of dance to make it snazzier. I understand that musical theatre is meant to be heightened in style and energy, however I also believe that we should respect where different styles of dance have come from. This is why, when I become a choreographer later in my life, I will make sure to choreograph any routine I do to match the style and understand why they dance the way they do. By doing all of this research, I now know how I need to use my time resourcefully and efficiently to research any style of dance I may come across in a show and/or an audition.
Acting:
Sight Reading:
Sight reading is the ability to read words or music on a page out loud in real time. You see this being used in early rehearsals, workshops, research and development weeks but firstly at a table read. I have had a few opportunities this last year to be able to improve my sight reading with a couple of research & development weeks and some acting lessons like Actor and Text. One of these opportunities arose when I was asked to be part of a musical, a group of second year musical theatre students were creating as part of their academic curriculum. Please see ‘Second Year Musical R&D’ for an example of a table read.
Table reads allow you to get to know the script, story and vibe of the characters you are embodying and working with. However, it can be difficult to understand the tone of the scene with the first read through. This was a great opportunity which allowed me to use a script again after such a long time, it was also so fun to be working with my peers in scenes with a creative team. As you can hear in the voice note, I tend to stutter when reading new lines aloud, I believe this is due to me not understanding or knowing what the lines mean or what tone I should speak in yet. A few challenges were presented throughout the week, such as the script kept changing meaning I had to adapt and try and remember the changed lines in scenes. Further, it was masterclass week, and I was asked to be part of a Master’s Musical Direction student’s assessment, so I was so busy alongside these rehearsals. As seen in the video ‘Woven Act 1, Scene 2’, we performed what we had been working on that week, and this was the finished product of the scene. Because I didn’t know my lines fully, I was still sight reading, but I had a general idea of what they were. But due to the rehearsals I knew what emotions I needed to convey and what the tone of the scene was. Sight reading is a good skill to have for your process in early rehearsals, as it makes going over scenes and songs a lot smoother, thus making rehearsals a lot more efficient. To improve my ability to sight read, I will read books and plays a lot more frequently than I do now and doing so aloud should enable me to read more smoothly and carry out scenes more efficiently.
Character Embodiment:
Throughout this year, we have had weekly Acting Through Song classes, in this class we get up one at a time to have a one-on-one workshop for the song we are wanting to sing. We go through the song and pick out details like:
- Word emphasis through dialoguing
- What the character is feeling
- Staging
- Physicality
- Meaning of a phrase
- How the music helps you
Over the course of this academic year, I have sung in this class on a multitude of occasions. Some consistent feedback I received was my nervous habit of fiddling with my trouser pocket, flaps or zips, as seen in videos ‘Seeing is Believing’ and ‘Martin Guerre’. It is interesting to think about why I do have this nervous habit as when I was singing “Martin Guerre” (Schönberg, Boublil, Clark, 1999), I didn’t even realise I was doing it. However, in “Seeing is Believing” (Lloyd Webber, Black, Day, Roman, Hart,1989) I didn’t confidently know the lyrics and in the moment, they escaped me, which I believe is why I came out of character.
The discovery that nerves can be a cause of this particular issue has evidenced to me the importance of working on character with lyrics at same time when practicing. Having said that, I have some issues when it comes to literacy and remembering lines. This means that I need to give myself more time to revise lines and lyrics more than I have this year alongside everything else. This will the allow me to develop my character and embody them. We were taught a method of how we can do this in an actor movement class. We were given pages 9 through 11 from the film version of ‘The Great Gatsby’ (Sánchez Rodríguez, 2013) and across the two lessons, we learned a dance, the scene and a few methods to create your character. One to which was closing our eyes and imaging your character getting ready to go to Gatsby’s party: how you are dressed, why are you going, are you quiet and reserved or loud and boisterous. I found it to be an incredibly useful tool to build my own sense of the same character to my peers.
On the other hand, I have worked with the song “Still” from Anastasia (Flaherty, Ahrens, 2017) for over a year, so I know who the character is and what he’s feeling in this song. I have improved and learned to fully embody the character I am portraying, as seen in the video ‘Still – Anastasia’. Being embodied in your character allows you to make acting choices to aid in scenes; the way you stand and your mannerisms. It is a way to make the character your own, hence it is essential an actor can do this.
Voice:
Falling off and under voicing:
One of my tendencies this year when it comes to my singing was falling off and under voicing the ends of lines. This was usually due to my use of vibrato when ending lines, making my voice aspirate and breathy. As heard in the audio clip ‘Explanation of vibrato‘, Kathy explains that I had a very fast vibrato which accompanies my breathy voice at the end of phrases. This means we lose that “interesting sound”, making the lyric or song being sung a lot less impactful and compelling for the audience to listen to.
A way I found that enabled me to keep the full sound was to make sure to keep my body and voice anchored. This also ties to my goal of being embodied in the character. If I am trying to focus on my voice rather than portraying a character, I will come out of it, losing the purpose and message the song is trying to convey. Audio clip ‘Being anchored and grounded’ demonstrates how singing is meant to feel and what I am meant to do when singing an entire phrase and not just the beginning to the middle. Furthermore, in the video ‘Still – Anastasia’, you can hear that I am under voicing some of the lines and not dictating words. This makes me lose my anchoring in the voice as seen in ‘Still feedback’.
To make sure I keep consistency in my practise, I will use these exercises when warming up my voice. It is important that these exercises are put into frequent practise so I can aid my ability to embody my character and make all my lines (spoken or sung) as interesting and impactful as possible.
Consistency of vocal range:
When leaving Emil Dale Academy last year, I was proud of how my voice had developed, I had the experience to work on my belt, raise my falsetto from an A4 to a C5, look at my legit style of singing and so much more. On this course, we are tutored with ‘Vocal Technique’ classes where we learned in a lecture about registers and phonation, about how we have 4 laryngeal mechanisms (Roubeau, Henrich, and Castellengo, 2009) These are called:
- M0, Pulse Register – Vocal fry where the vocal folds are slacked
- M1, Model Register – Chest voice, a full and supported voice
- M2, Falsetto Register – Head voice, corded and unsupported head tone
- M3, Whistle Register – Whistle tone, flageolet, flute register.
Each of these mechanisms rely on the thyroarytenoid (TA) and cricothyroid (CT) muscles. As seen in the image ‘Thyroarytenoid and cricothyroid muscles’ highlighted in red. (Belyk, Yune Lee, Brown, 2018). In the same lecture, we were told that M0 uses the TA muscle only, M1 uses mostly TA and some CT, M2 uses mostly CT and some TA and finally M3 uses only CT; TA being relaxed. Meaning the lower you go, the more TA muscle you use and the higher you rise in pitch, the more the CT muscle is used.
When it comes to my voice type and development this year, I believe my M1 has significantly improved, especially my lower range. My 1-2-1 singing teacher Kathy is still undecided after a year of training what my voice type is, debating between a baritone and a tenor. Kathy believes doesn’t know as I have quite a strong lower register sound that isn’t a usual tenor quality.
Despite trying to raise my vocal range, I have improved more since last year at Emil Dale Academy. Comparing videos ‘Seeing is Believing’ (1:40-2:20) and ‘It Only Takes a Moment’ (Herman, 1996), it is noticeable that I have been able to develop my more lower chest voice and legit style of singing with my low larynx. I have performed “Seeing is Believing” differently to what the actual song is as it is originally a duet, but I have sheet music that has male alternative lyrics which allow me to make it a solo and allowing me to sing the whole song and use my range (please see images ‘Seeing is Believing, [Male] Alternative p1’ and ‘Seeing is Believing, [Male] Alternative p2’). Both songs reach a Bb2 (on the first “believing” and “I”; as well as “only”), but my voice is much more resonant, strong and supported in “Seeing is Believing”. A supported voice allows a performer to be safer while singing, meaning they can sing for an extended period of time, particularly coming useful for performing 7 or 8 times a week.
Similarly, I also think my upper M1 voice has improved, up toward A4. Last year I sung “No Longer you” (Michaels, 2021) from EPIC the musical, Underworld Saga as seen in the video ‘No Longer You’. As you can hear on the line “who had long believed your dead”, the word “long” is an A4, which was more of a shout then a supported belt. This in the long run is not safe for my voice as I am straining my voice just to hit a note, potentially damaging my vocal folds. Contrastingly, in the beginning of my video of ‘Martin Guerre’ there is an A4 which has consistently been a lot more comfortable to hit. To improve my upper register, I have been working with Kathy to stretch and improve my upper register as seen in ‘Vocal Exercise with Kathy 1‘ and Vocal Exercise with Kathy 2‘ as well as exposing myself to songs with high notes, allowing me to work my voice and increase my range and consistency of comfortability. Since this has worked this year, I will continue to use this method but in a safe way as to not damage my voice.
It is well known that the industry is making new musicals where the male lead vocal requirements are getting higher and higher. That is why I am trying to develop my voice the way I am. I want to keep my lower notes strong to make me more versatile and equipped for different roles already in the industry but also bearing in mind about the future of musical theatre.
Conclusion:
I am proud of the progress I have made in the first year of my degree. Last year I had developed so much as a performer, and this year has further improved my acting, voice and dance ability. I have been able to achieve some of my goals I set at the beginning of the year, as well as work on my formative assessment feedback, as seen in my ‘PDP Template’. I have worked on my top notes, been up in acting through song as much as I could, using my lyrical and emotionally driven songs as suggested by one of my tutors. Although, if I was able to do it all again, I would make sure I stretched a lot more often than I did this year to really hone in on my passive flexibility (though this will be a degree long goal) and read some of the extra information given to us on the space page so I can strive to be a better performer. My aim from now on is to make more specific goals for myself, for example when doing personal practise, only working on turns rather than performance, leaps, kicks and turns. I will keep adding strings to my bow, developing these skills and goals and adding new ones will carry me over summer and my second year so I can be as ready to push through third year with everything I have.
Bibliography:
Baila Productions Salsa Dance School (2023) Cuban Salsa vs. New York Style Salsa: What’s the Difference?, . Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEV04Oxeh6w [Accessed: 10/05/2026].
Belyk, M., Yune Lee, S., Brown, S., (2018) How does human motor cortex regulate vocal pitch in singers?. R Soc Open Sci. 1 August; 5 (8): 172208. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.172208
Boud, D., Keogh, R., & Walker, D. (1985). Promoting Reflection in Learning: A Model. Reflection: Turning Reflection into Learning. London: Routledge.
Cleveland Clinic (2024) Dynamic stretching vs. static stretching, Cleveland Clinic. Available at: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/dynamic-stretching-vs-static-stretching [Accessed: 17/05/2026].
Flaherty. S., Ahrens. L., . (2017). Still. Anastasia [Musical Score] Milwaukee (WI): Hal Leonard Corporation
Gimby, V. (2021) Why is the performing arts industry more vital than ever?, Leeds Conservatoire. Available at: https://www.leedsconservatoire.ac.uk/about-us/news/why-is-the-performing-arts-industry-more-vital-than-ever/ [Accessed: 09/05/2026].
Gonzales, B. (2025) A detailed guide to different salsa dance styles in 2025, Sensual Movement USA. Available at: https://sensualmovementusa.com/popular-salsa-dance-styles/ [Accessed: 10/05/2026].
Hanson, D. (2013) 3 different styles of Salsa Puerto Rican dancing, . Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSsAiwQ8PxI [Accessed: 28/04/2026].
Herman J., (1996) It Only Takes a Moment. Hello Dolly!. [Musical Score] Hal Leonard Corporation
La Suerte Dance School (2020) Timba / Salsa Musicality Challenge #LaSuerteChallenge, . Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G9EXslQ43w [Accessed: 28/04/2026].
La Suerte Dance School (2021) Rueda moves 1 – Dame, Dame dos, Directo (easy changes), . Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRAZmtcBlAw [Accessed: 10/05/2026].
Lloyd Webber. A., Black. D., Day. R., Roman. L., Hart, C. (1989). Seeing is Believing. Aspects of Love. [Musical Score] London: Really Useful Group
Michaels, A. (2021) No Longer You Jorge Rivera-Herrans, Scribd. Available at: https://www.scribd.com/document/1010665061/No-Longer-You-Jorge-Rivera-Herrans [Accessed: 24 May 2026].
Roubeau, B., Henrich, N. and Castellengo, M. (2009) ‘Laryngeal vibratory mechanisms: The notion of vocal register revisited’, Journal of Voice, 23(4), pp. 425–438. https://doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2007.10.014.
Sánchez Rodríguez, A. (2013) Great Gatsby (2013), Scribd. Available at: https://www.scribd.com/document/618285629/Great-Gatsby-2013 [Accessed: 24 May 2026].
Schönberg C. M., Boublil A., Clark S. (1999). Martin Guerre, Martin Guerre [Musical Score] Hal Leonard
Yazbek. D (2005) The More We Dance, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (Original Broadway Cast Recording) [Streamed]. https://music.amazon.co.uk/search/the+more+we+dance?filter=IsLibrary%7Cfalse&sc=none [Accessed 10/05/2026]
