By Millie Roberts
25102262
Prac. Development Portfolio
Introduction
Throughout this portfolio, I will be delving into my development as a performer in the musical theatre industry. This will focus on how my strengths and weaknesses have changed throughout the year, seeing what has improved immensely and what still needs a lot of work to get to a similar level. My biggest weakness all year round though has been my confidence, and this portfolio has quite a focus on this and how I am beginning to overcome nerves and do things I could have never imagined doing this time last year.
Dance
Dance was what I dreaded most coming to Leeds Conservatoire as I have never had a dance lesson previous to coming here and hadn’t ever really danced on a stage. The closest I had come to dancing was filming dance self-tapes for drama school.
This video was taken in February of 2025. In this video, you can see that my weight is sinking into my hip of my supporting leg (especially when kicking in second), this is completely incorrect posture and makes my kicks unsteady. With kicks, you are meant to travel through the tendu first before kicking, which I am not doing (Hackett, 2011). I’m just throwing my leg in the air and hoping for the best. Also, I am kicking higher than my leg strength allows me to, I should have kept my kicks to a 45º angle so that the kicks looked stronger and I could have instead made it look easier. With how high I am kicking also, you can see that my supporting leg each time is struggling to support me and looks like I might slip any second, which is not a safe way to kick and could lead to an injury.
Starting dance in September was very intimidating, especially considering a lot of the people in my group had danced before. Tap was my biggest worry considering I had never even put tap shoes on before September.
‘Nicest Kids in Town’ (Thorell, 2008)was the first repertoire routine that we had properly learnt. We had learnt a few other basic dances to ease us into jazz rep but this definitely pushed the boat for me at the time. This video is from November and already you can see the weakness in my legs as I nearly fall over just from spinning. This would be due to my centre of gravity being off, my weight wasn’t in my core and, judging by how I nearly fell, there was too much of my weight in the top half of my body that wasn’t being controlled (The glowing orb: your centre of gravity, 2021). Looking back also, this dance took me a while to learn at the time, always checking in with Damien to see if what I was doing was okay. My confidence in dance was quite low when I arrived so this wasn’t too shocking.
Then, unfortunately, as we were learning our next repertoire piece, I sprained my ankle. I had jumped and landed on the outer side of my right ankle. This caused me to sit out of dance for about a month and a half because my ankle wouldn’t stop aching. I did go to physio in this time and was given exercises to do in order to try and recover faster. Though, nothing seemed like it was working. This caused me to go into a state of constant upset whenever dance was mentioned. I was just beginning to improve my skills, especially in tap, and now I couldn’t do it. This is a common thing to happen in performers, dancers mostly, but they will go through a depressive stage because they watch everyone practice and improve knowing that they can’t (Air, 2013).
After Easter, despite my ankle still not feeling its best, it was bearable. And I began to teach myself the dances that I had missed out on in the meantime. This is something I never would have imagined myself doing before Christmas as I depended too much on others to teach me. I think I learnt a lot of learning independence through having to sit and watch everyone else for so long. This alone was a huge boost in my confidence in dance.
I spent an entire afternoon watching all of the videos in our group’s chat, checking all the different angles to try and make it as accurate as possible. Knowing that this is a heels routine, I decided to learn in jazz shoes in order to check in my ankle could handle it without the strain of being in heels. ‘The More We Dance’ (Lithgow and Rene Scott, 2005) was the most technical routine we had done so far in the year.
My rendition of the dance from what I taught myself was not the most accurate, however, it was an accomplishment to learn that much of a dance without having help from anyone. There were details missing that I double checked afterwards but I had the base of the dance down. Also, I wasn’t very stable in the heels and that is obvious in the video so I decided to be responsible and not put my body through any extra unnecessary pain before assessments.
After learning the jazz rep, I decided that I needed to desperately catch up on my tap lessons. So, I practiced steps on my own until I got them right. In tap in the beginning of the year, I would get frustrated and cry when I couldn’t do a step but now, I was taking my time to ensure that it was right. Despite the fact that my ‘Anything Goes’ (Gaga and Bennett, 2014) routine was a bit rusty and not as smooth with the transitions as I would have liked, I’m really proud with how my pullbacks are coming along. I’m extremely happy with how clean and separated the sounds of my double pullback are. I think coming back to tap made me more confident after going away for a while.
My confidence in tap just continued to grow as time went on. Karis and I did the ‘Anything Goes’ duet in front of the entire class despite how nervous we usually get when we are watched doing something we’re uncomfortable with. I even joined in at the tap jam held at the Venue in St Peters Square. I was surrounded by people that I definitely consider to be better tappers than me and yet I still had fun. This was my first time ever having a ‘dance solo’ in front of an audience that I don’t know.
My dance confidence has come back better than it ever was and ever could have been. I think despite the pain and sorrows that my ankle injury caused, it ended up doing some good as I got to experience how I was taking things for granted in dance and how I was genuinely improving each week, it was just slowly but surely.
Singing
I was most confident with my singing when I first arrived in September. Despite this, I did not find repertoire that was good for my vocal type and didn’t have the right technique for the repertoire that I had chosen. For example, my legit song for the recall was ‘So Many People’ from Stephen Sondheim’s Saturday Night (Sondheim, 1995). This song is typically sung by sopranos which made no sense for me to sing considering I’m an alto.
Legit singing in musical theatre came from classical singing that was found in the operas, therefore, legit singing should have round and open vowels and be more legato to create the classical line sound (Pauley, 2021). From watching this video of me from 2025, it’s clear that I don’t understand these principles and I am just singing in my head voice. The sound is very aspirate and doesn’t have much strength to it. This is what legit was to me at this time, I thought it was soft and high and that was it. I didn’t research how to do it correctly and I didn’t have a singing teacher to show me how.
In the video, I do try to mimic those rounder vowel sounds from listening to the original cast recording but because it wasn’t an intentional choice to sound more classical, it just sounds quite weird.
When I first arrived at Leeds Conservatoire, I was still in this mindset of legit meaning singing high, I also at this point wasn’t sure how to find interesting/not overdone repertoire. When we were asked to sing a jazz age or golden age song for our first ATS lesson, I was really intimidated as I did not listen to this era of musical theatre. I associated it so much with classical pieces that I found it boring so went with one of the only golden age shows that I knew of at the time. I chose ‘Goodbye, Little Dream, Goodbye’ from Cy Coleman’s Anything Goes (1983).
The issues with this performance are very similar to the issues that I had with my callback legit song. It’s a very airy sound due to the song being at the higher end of my vocal range. The high notes are certainly there in my voice but they aren’t strong enough to sound good. It felt uncomfortable to sing this song, having never really sang that high outside of messing around. If I were to continue singing out of my range like I did here, it could lead to some issues. It’s a similar analogy to, if you’ve never done the splits before, you won’t just get down into the splits with no pain. It’s the same with our voices, we need to slowly train our voices to get used to singing in a higher register and pull back when needed (Scearce, 2016). I needed to learn to listen to my body more and realise that the song wasn’t uncomfortable because I was bad, it was because my voice had never sang so high for a long period of time before and needed to adjust.
My one-to-one singing teacher is Sarah, she has a speciality in opera so luckily she knew exactly what my voice needed when expanding my range to sing legit. Sarah offered the song ‘Once You Lose Your Heart’ from Noel Gay’s Me and My Girl (1993). oThe song was written for a mezzo-soprano range and therefore was much more do-able for me. Now that I had a song that I could perform comfortably whilst still expanding my range slightly, we could focus on the other issues with my legit sound. Legit needs accurate diction due to how its vowels are a bit more exaggerated than they would be if you were speaking colloquially. Also, legit needs a lot of breath control when staying in head voice (Forward Voice Studio, 2023). As you can hear from the video, my stamina wasn’t great and so I began to go to the gym where I would work on doing more cardio than I was ever doing to ensure that this would improve.
Though, unfortunately, due to my ankle injury that happened late January, I wasn’t able to go to the gym for much longer. My vocal stamina slowly worsened again which was very discouraging and I ended up getting really upset with myself. For a month or so, I didn’t practice my legit style as much as I should have as I only felt a sense of shame whenever I struggled with stamina. Eventually, I began to get brave again and tried legit again.
This was my first time filming myself singing legit since the injury and I decided to also film my face so that I would be fully vulnerable to the camera, just to push myself a bit further. As expected, my stamina hasn’t improved much since the previous video but there is still a difference. Also, technically, my legit is more sound and the sound is at the front of my mouth instead of at the back which creates a fuller sound. This is partially why I will sound slightly breathy in this video. Despite the fact that I know this, even when I was recording, it is still obvious in the video that I’m uncomfortable and don’t really want to be doing it. However, I am glad I did because even the little improvement that there is stamina-wise, my technique has massively improved throughout the year. Going onwards with legit, I just need to be doing it more often and now that I can do exercise on my ankle, I can work on my stamina again.
When I wasn’t confident in my stamina for legit, I moved to chest-voice and belt-y songs. I was more determined with these and decided that I could push myself more in this direction in order to feel better about my legit.
The belt voice I chose was ‘Wherever He Aint’ from Jerry Herman’s Mack and Mabel (2007). Partially, I had turned to belt after struggling with stamina because for belting you need reduced air pressure in the voice and you focus a lot more on being grounded to hit the notes (Andy Follin, 2017). The voice recording is the first time I had ever sang through this song with Sarah and through my volume and energy, you can already tell that this was more in my comfort zone than legit is. Though, when the big note arrives I sing it in head voice. After a bit of coaching from Sarah, the warmup used to show that the note was in my body in belt, I just had to go for it. For this song especially, twang is very important to make the belted note sound better, especially considering the vowel sound that it’s on. Twang creates a brighter sound, opposite to the rounded vowels that were used in legit (Gagné, 2015).
After having worked on such a twangy belt and having some legit techniques in my pocket, I moved onto an early contemporary song that mixed belt and legit and met them both in the middle. The song I chose was ‘Anytime (I am There)’ from William Finn’s Elegies (2006).
I brought the song into both vocal tech and ATS to work on as I will be doing it for my singing assessment (alongside ‘Wherever He Aint’) to ensure that it was sounding good and exceptional. The first time I performed it was in ATS and when we get to the first belted note, I chicken out and do it in head voice even though it’s the same not as ‘Wherever He Aint’. It was like I had to wait for permission to be allowed to belt out the emotional climax of the song. Looking back at this moment, the worst that would have happened would have been that I would’ve had a voice crack, something that has happened to everyone in my course. I hold myself to some sort of weird pedestal where I believe I’m not allowed to make any mistakes. Then, after the ATS lesson, I bring the song to vocal tech where Scott Harrison says I’m using too much effort on the vowels of the belts and can use less effort whilst still maintaining energy. This is shown in the video as we change my vowel placement, merging an ‘a’ and an ‘e’ vowel and fully dropping my jaw to just let the note come out. After figuring out where that sat in my body so that I wouldn’t have to think about it when performing, it has made this song so much easier to sing. I would say belting has now become one of my strengths of the year which occurred only due to my lack of confidence in legit. My nerves ended up pushing me to thrive in another skill which I’m really glad at, considering I believed after my confidence went with the stamina, I would stay in a vocal rut of no improvement.
Acting
This section will mostly focus on the ATS side of acting as I feel like that area of my skills has improved the most and also, a lot of my acting methods haven’t changed since my previous Actor & Text portfolio.
This is an old video from February 2025 and this was my attempt at ATS. This is a rendition of ‘Cabaret’ from the musical Cabaret (Kander and Ebb, 2007). Watching this video back now feels surreal due to my lack of understanding of the show and the song. The intention of the song is entirely wrong and wasn’t thought out at all, it’s impossible for any watcher to separate the actor from character. An audience member doesn’t want to be reminded of the fact that they’re watching a performer on stage playing a role but unfortunately that is exactly what I do in this video.
Thankfully, ATS quickly whipped me into shape here as we learnt about the ‘three circles of attention’ which really aided me in my acting journey. The circles of attention made it so much easier for me to visualise and it made it easier for me to link the score to my acting choices because if my song mentions trees, I know it’s the third circle of attention because it’s in the distance (http://www.facebook.com/denvercenter, 2025). This really helped me overcome my acting problem of everything being in one place. The circles, despite not being real and the audience not being able to see what I’m envisioning, creates a depth in the space as I feel like I’m genuinely looking at some trees that are quite a distance away.
Intentions is where I had a large breakthrough this year. I have never really gotten emotionally invested in a song that I have performed in the past, I had always managed to keep me and the character separate. Except, when I did ‘Anytime (I am There)’ in ATS we changed the intention from how I’d been practicing. I had been making the entire song sad, a mother watching her children go on without her and she’s upset from the beginning.
The, Aaron challenged me to try and see the light in it, how a mother would protect their kids from sad things like death and we tried it that way. So, we decided on the action, to reassure (MCGOWAN, 2022). At the beginning, the intention of the mother became more clear, she wanted her kids to be okay. It was more bittersweet and created more genuine emotion. Then, we got close to the climax of the song and I slowly began to tear up just imagining what that must be like as a parent. It was devastatingly beautiful and I was really pleased with the emotion it evoked in me and I feel like I understand the song on a more personal level now because of this.
Conclusion
Overall, this year I believe I’ve become a better performer all around. I’m very proud of how my mindset has grown over the year and how I’ve been able to do things I would have never imagined doing in a million years. I’ve grown a new appreciation for the craft as well, everything is so much harder than it looks and you really need to keep on top of it because it can go in an instant. I think my biggest strength currently is still my singing despite my stamina still not being great. But, the skill that I think has improved the most over the year is dance, tap dance specifically. I am managing to do moves I thought I’d never be able to learn and it’s been such a wonderful journey to learn all of this and be a better performer because of it. Over the summer holidays, I’m going to keep working on each skill so that I come back an even stronger version of myself.
Bibliography
Air, M.E. (2013) Psychological Distress Among Dancers Seeking Outpatient Treatment for Musculoskeletal Injury. Journal of Dance Medicine & Science, 17(3), 115–125.
Andy Follin (2017) Belting Explained | What is Belt? | How to Belt (Singing) a Musical Theatre or Pop Song. Andy Follin (Estill EMT) – Professional Vocal Coach. Available online: https://www.vocalskills.co.uk/What-is-Belt-Belting.html.
Coleman, C. (1983) Anything Goes: Vocal Selections. Alfred Publishing Co.
Finn, W. (2006) Elegies: Vocal Selections. Alfred Publishing Co.
Forward Voice Studio. (2023) Forward Voice Studio. Available online: https://www.forwardvoicestudio.com/blog/legit-vs-belting-understanding-the-difference-between-singing-styles [Accessed 1 May 2026]. priority_highWebpage authorclose
Gaga, L. and Bennett, T. (2014) Anything Goes. Dae Bennett. Available online: https://youtu.be/Fg1meK-IgOM?si=3BSzDk1Yw6fe0K-S.
Gagné, J. (2015) Belting A Guide to Healthy, Powerful Singing. Berklee Press.
Gay, N. (1993) Me and My Girl: Vocal Selections. Music Sales.
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Herman, J. (2007) Mack and Mabel: Vocal Selections. Faber Music Ltd.
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MCGOWAN, E. (2022) Actioning In Acting: A Full Guide. Backstage.com. Available online: https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/actioning-acting-explained-75443/.
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Scearce, L. (2016) Manual of Singing Voice Rehabilitation. Plural Publishing.
Sondheim, S. (1955) Saturday Night [Score] Location: Bridewell Theatre, London
The glowing orb: your centre of gravity. (2021) Dragonfly Dance. Available online: https://www.dragonflydance.com.au/post/the-glowing-orb-your-centre-of-gravity.priority_highWebpage authorclose
Thorell, C. (2008) Nicest Kids in Town. Marc Shaiman. Available online: https://youtu.be/FrXHjkKPVEI?si=3XA4DXuIMX07Arz0.
