The techniques of Angela Caine are a breath of fresh air to students rediscovering their voices at her Soho workshop. MOIRA PETTY finds out how a singer can benefit from bouncing around like an 'oversized baby' on a big rubber ball.

In a studio in the heart of Soho's Greek Street fear and inhibition are abandoned. Like hyperactive toddlers the students bounce around on giant balls, or swing from a massive climbing frame while reciting snatches of Shakespeare or Lewis Carroll, or half sing, half reed a recipe for muesli.

A former singer, who has been refining her voice workout theories for 25 years since she hit a crisis in her own career, she takes her students back to a time before they developed potentially disastrous controlled breathing techniques.

Her principle is simple. Body and voice function together, therefore they should be exercised together. Moreover, actors and singers should not be taught mutually exclusive vocal techniques. "We have one vocal machine that expresses one individuality and the two functions of that vocal machine should have the same quality - a quality uniquely yours," she says.

Caine's techniques for renewing and reinvigorating the voice came after she was faced with every singer's nightmare - she lost her voice. "My voice couldn't take the professional pace. If I gave a bad performance, I'd say I was tired."

This spelled the end of her career as a freelance singer but a quarter of a century on she offers hope for those in a similar predicament. "You shouldn't lose your voice after a heavy workload. The strong voice requires nothing more to recuperate than to have a really good sing to replace its essential oils and release its tensions.

Her own problems were rooted, she believes, in breathing techniques still taught on many music and drama courses. Caine, a former scholarship student at the Guildhall School of Music, where she specialised in opera says: "In those days drama and music were separate issues.

"My singing training made a bigger and bigger gap between those two areas. I was taught to breathe in such a way that I began to develop the standard singer's body - a thickening around the middle, with stiff legs - which reduced my ability to move.

"The converse is that dancers can't sing. But singing and dancing together is the most natural thing."

She says 'the system' requires students to support the voice on the breath. She demonstrates, taking a deep breath. "I'm tightening my hip joints and I've got a bubble of air between me and my voice," she explains.

This produces a voice, which is strong but inflexible. The result? "An inflexible voice means people get typecast and have trouble with accents." Caine wants to keep the strength but put back the flexibility.

Rather than separating singing and acting techniques the key is to combine them, for "the quality of the voice comes from its singing characteristics." Moreover, she says: "Anything going on in the voice should co-ordinate with the body. If you want to suddenly run across the stage your voice shouldn't change unless you want it to." Caine's workshop classes include a summation of basic physiology. The interrelation of body and voice is explained thus: The skeleton gives strength, the muscles give flexibility, and the larynx or voice box gives spring.

"I can teach people to do extraordinary things while they sing. I was called in when Finnish TV was screening an opera about circus performers in which one had to turn cartwheels while singing an aria."

In the workshop, voices are exercised while bodies are on the move. To the observer, the liberation of the voice once the body is stretched and the muscles are flexed is evident. "Usually when you are asked to increase volume, the pitch goes up, but if the muscles are working the way they should the volume is available to them."

Another exercise shows the effect of singing on the speaking voice. Following large print texts on the wall, students will switch from speaking to singing to speaking. After singing, the speaking voice is discernibly more colourful. Or the student may be asked to sit on one of the large coloured balls, arms raised, stretching a piece of elastic held between the hands, reciting a speech but singing the verbs. The movement frees the hips, knees, and ankles.

Then there is scat singing while climbing the frame (Caine first gives instructions so that movements have the fluidity of apes swinging from branch to branch rather than the nervous, hunched up progression with which most people first approach the frame).

Many of Caine's exercises will have practical application for the performer in rehearsal. Two players sitting back to back on a stool will feel sound vibrations against each other's back - "A good way to rehearse emotional scenes."

A complicated speech can be practised while throwing bean bags or balls back and forth to a partner. "A lot of energy is required for serious speech - but energy can get stuck in the face and the body will not look happy." Not only does the throwing movement free the voice but it encourages peripheral vision.

There is a sequential relationship between the course of six one-and-a-half hour workshop classes run by Caine, although students may take as many or as few as they wish and leave whatever gap best suits them between classes.

The first class covers stretching. Caine is an ardent advocate of promoting the spring system on which the voice works. In The Voice Workbook and accompanying tape, which she has produced, she suggests putting a heavy flowerpot on the head to stimulate the spring causing the body to lengthen and stretch.

The second class covers balance to stabilise the voice and has students reciting on balance and wobble boards. In the third class, Caine looks at language and how it works. She investigates how individual habits of speech are overlaid on anything the student does with his or her voice. She points out that anyone unable to alter their own speech rhythms will be unable to take on anyone else's rhythms. She also helps eradicate Received Pronunciation, which can lead to stiffness of expression.

The fourth class looks at the role of the back, ensuring the spine acts as a spring and using the back as a resonance chamber. The connection of voice and back is one that Caine is investigating in a research programme with a physiotherapist. Bad vocal techniques can lead to back problems, she says.

Climbing is the theme of the fifth class. "I teach my class to be four-footed creatures. They have to move their bodies in spirals and rotations in order to read the poems printed on the wall. When they go on a stage the whole co-ordination between voice and body is sharpened up."

The last class is concerned with rhythm and spring and pulls together techniques learned previously.

Caine's tips and workouts can be used in everyday life as well as in performance. In many ways what she says goes against received wisdom. The most clichéd piece of advice to the nervous - "Take a deep breath and calm down" only exacerbates the problem, causing the voice to become high-pitched and squeaky. And once she has pointed it out, one cannot help but hear the sharp intake of breath every time the radio is switched on or someone begins a speech over a microphone

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