Antonio Ocampo-Guzmán: Actor, Director, Professor and Linklater Voice Teacher

FALL 2009 175 Antonio Ocampo-Guzmán: Actor, Director, Professor and Linklater Voice Teacher An interview by Carlos Manuel Antonio Ocampo-Guzmán is an actor, director and teacher, originally from Bogotá, Colombia where he trained as an actor with the Teatro Libre. He came to the US in 1993 to train at Shakespeare & Company and with renowned voice teacher Kristin Linklater — “Freeing the Natural Voice.” Antonio was the first Spanish-speaker to become a Designated Linklater Teacher and has adapted the practice into Spanish. He serves as a consultant for the Center for Voice Studies (CEUVOZ) in Mexico City and teaches annually at the Estudio Corazza para el Actor in Madrid, Spain. Antonio is a member of VASTA (Voice & Speech Trainers Association). He earned his Masters of Fine Arts in Directing at York University in Toronto, Ontario in 2003 and currently serves on the faculty of the Department of Theatre at Northeastern University, Boston. When did you start to get involved in voice training, ¿cómo comenzó todo? When I was a student-actor at Teatro Libre in Bogotá, my teacher took a workshop with Kristin Linklater at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, and then began to use some of the voice exercises in class. En esa época my teacher asked me if I could translate the introduction of the book so other students could read it. She also asked me to be her apprentice. Were you always interested in voice? Yes. I always have loved singing and music. I love the physical sensation of sound. In 1993 I came to Shakespeare & Company, and what I learned was that even though I had trained as an actor for four years in Bogot á, I had never felt that the characters or the plays had anything to do with 176 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW me. They were something always in front of me; I was always behind my characters. When I went to S&C and discovered this voice training process, suddenly everything became clear. It was me who was expressing myself through these different characters. I wasn’t inventing a character, putting on a character. It was me expressing myself, all my stories, my thoughts, feelings, memories, my imagination through my voice, through the speaking of the words. That was an incredible shift in my understanding of what theatre is. I used to think theatre was me pretending to be somebody else but through the Linklater voice practice I learned that theatre can be a vehicle of my personal self-expression through the characters I play and the words I speak. The Linklater voice practice is based on freeing the person that speaks and not just about making a beautiful perfect sound. It’s about finding who you are and how you can fully express yourself through your voice. That made perfect sense to me, to my intellect, my emotional life, and to my desire to be an actor. At the end of that workshop I decided that I wanted to learn how to teach the Linklater practice and I ended up staying with Shakespeare & Company for three years. How does a person become a Designated Linklater Teacher? In order to teach this work, people must first do a lot of work to free their own voice: spend at least one year observing one of the Master Teachers teaching, while taking private lessons. After that you are invited to take a workshop with Kristin Linklater — we call that the “Designation Workshop ” — where you work very intensively for five weeks, teaching and training and getting feedback on your teaching. Eventually Kristin decides if you’re good enough to become a Designated Linklater Teacher. During the time I was with S&C working as an actor, once in a while I would take a workshop with Kristin in Boston. I also took private lessons with a master teacher twice a week for those three years. Then I began to teach at S&C. Later, Kristin invited me to move to Boston to focus more consistently on my training. She was teaching at Emerson College. I began to observe her classes and eventually I was hired to teach there. It took me five years from the moment I arrived at...