Facilitating Jaw Release Through Improved Habits of Stance and Alignment
Thursday 6th February 2025, 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM (London Time)
Objective: In this interactive workshop, participants assess their current habits of postural stance and dental occlusion and learn techniques to facilitate and maintain jaw release. Despite excellent voice training, many singers and speakers present with jaw tension. The initial cause is often not in the jaw itself but in unfortunate habits of foot posture and stance. Resulting misalignments throughout the body adversely affect many aspects of phonation, including pitch range, dynamics, consistency, ease, articulation, and flexibility. Jaw release maneuvers, while quite helpful (and included in this workshop), are temporary fixes because they don’t address the underlying physical misalignment. Numerous studies have shown that mandibular positions are related to foot posture and gait stability, through the established relationship between posture and the stomatognathic system, including functions such as chewing, speech, swallowing, yawning, and breathing. A more supportive and balanced stance provides the foundational support for the skull that is necessary for consistent release of misplaced jaw tension.
Methods: This hands-on workshop teaches self assessment of current habits of jaw alignment (malocclusion, misplaced tension) and stance (pronation/supination, plantar fascia flexibility, and arch stability), as well as corrective exercises and techniques. Participants learn self-massage and release techniques (including intra-oral massage); release and engagement maneuvers for supination/pronation, fascial flexibility, and arch support, as well as simple exercises for core strength and alignment. Participants have the opportunity to speak or sing as a group before, during, and after the exercises to assess improvement. Methods informing this work include Hennessy Breath & BodyWork, Postural Restoration, The Alexander Technique, The Thompson Method, and intra-oral and shiatsu massage.
Results and Conclusions: Participants facilitate lasting habits of jaw release by improving stance and body alignment. Benefits include improving foot engagement and postural support of the head, reducing muscle tension dysphonia, and increasing flow phonation and pitch range. This workshop’s massage and exercise sequence provides participants with a valuable takeaway for home and studio use.
Ruth Williams Hennessy
Ruth’s lifelong interest in mind-body-performance connections began with her mother’s daily practice of yoga and meditation in the 1960s, with the added benefit of teaching Ruth to think outside the box. Hennessy Breath & BodyWorkShops©, seen around the world, incorporate new concepts while respecting traditional teaching, thus employing a unique confluence of training, pedagogy, and performance experience.
Sorry, this is an archived short course...
We have plenty of upcoming short courses coming soon. See details of some of them below or look at the full list of short courses.

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Tuesday 17th June 2025
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Dr Katherine Skovira
We all know the feeling: staring down an audition panel, we lock up, our knees and hands shake, our breath stops, and we’re in emotional free fall. This is your limbic system going into hyperdrive. In the audition setting, when the limbic system or paleomammalian cortex kicks into action in the face of a perceived conflict, we experience the body’s answer to stressors from people and social interactions. In this course, Dr Katherine Skovira will walk you through steps to work with your limbic response and choose the most appropriate course of action to nail your next audition while honouring your internal mental and emotional landscape.


Wednesday 18th June 2025
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
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Ellen Hartley
Ellen Hartely has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company for over eight years - in this session she will explore how an accent coach can develop and deliver alternative (non-IPA) methods for coaching accents and dialects. There will be a particular focus on developing inclusive and accessible practice for all. Not all actors receive accent and dialect training in IPA, or indeed in any other specialist accent teaching method, others find IPA an unhelpful way to learn. Over a career you may need to find effective ways to coach any, and all, of the following: young people, amateur groups, a cast with mixed experience, professional actors with no formal training, or neurodivergent and learning-disabled actors.