Speak Up! Performance Skills for Writers with Siobhan Mac Mahon

Course Summary

If you have ever felt nervous reading your work in public, then this is the workshop for you! A lively, fun and hands-on workshop, where drama trained performance poet, Siobhan Mac Mahon, will skillfully lead you from shrinking violet to confident reader/performer of your own work.

In a supportive environment you will experiment with how to captivate and enthrall an audience with your own unique voice and style.

Course Outline

You will spend the day learning and practicing your performance skills. The morning will be spent doing drama and vocal exercises, giving you the skills and confidence to do justice to your words at a reading. We will explore: Voice, body-language, stage presence, microphone skills, eye contact, engagement with the audience and that hard-to-define on stage charisma.

The afternoon will be spent practicing your skills with your own piece/pieces of writing, culminating in a short reading/performance of your piece.

Bring along a piece/s of your own writing (Poetry, prose, memoir etc.) and come prepared to move!

Course Outcomes

You will leave feeling invigorated and inspired, with the skills and confidence to read your work in public and really bring it alive for your audience.

Siobhan Mac Mahon (MA Creative Writing UCD) is an award-winning poet who has been writing and performing her poetry for over twenty five years. She is an experienced and skilled facilitator, who has many years of creating and delivering writing and performance workshops in a wide range of communities and settings. Siobhan has collaborated extensively with other artists to create Spoken Word projects, combining poetry with music, dance and with film. She was the winner of WOMAD Festival poetry slam, The Ilkley Literature Open Mic. and the Sheffield, Off the Shelf Literature Festival Open Mic. She has been poet in residence for The International Permaculture Conference, London and for the Brigid of Faughart Festival, Dundalk.

Siobhán has run Speak Up! workshops with many writer’s groups in the UK and in Ireland. Siobhan has also worked freelance, as a writer, with community groups, with schools, with writer’s groups and with many arts organisations (Artworks Creative Communities, Kala Sangham, Artforms, Fabric, Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Thomas Danby College, East Leeds FM radio, Creative Partnerships) Siobhan’s experience and training enables her to put participants at ease so that they can achieve their best potential. Much of the focus of her work has been delivering creative writing workshops to vulnerable groups.