Dialect, Dialectics and Vocal Poetics: Envoicing the Other and Transforming the Self in/as Actor Training.

A Joint Paper by Mark Langley and Pamela Karantonis

Levels of Vocal Progress: Cognitive-Kineaesthetic

• The student-actor first perceives the distance for themselves between their untrained, everyday voice (incl. the cultural pressure for its diminution) and the demands placed on the stage voice.

• A simple example is the way that young adults can understand the baby/football fan analogy (by McCallion The Voice Book) whereby babies cry for hours a day and suffer no vocal fatigue, whereas a football fan can do vocal damage in less than an hour. This often gets them to ‘think’ about vocal habits, previously unconscious.

• The goal is for the student to form their own answer to: what is the actor’s voice? What is the real voice? Our ‘answer’ to this as voice coaches is that ‘realism’ in the voice is negotiated, is as the concept of realism in acting.

• In creating a ‘real’ voice, speech often meets unnaturalistic demands for projection. But this is on a continuum of training for all professional voices – with the genres of public speech and rhetoric.

• Linklater / Rodenburg account for the journey of the breath up to the voice box and how it powers the voice. Students need awareness of the physical cavity, the physical and imagined shape once tone is sounded.

Levels of Vocal Progress: Physical

• This is purely sonorous.• Students embrace the ‘other’ in terms of sound. This is

their raw material.• the urtöne (primal sound) is a lived concept – often

described as the first morning grunt or moan upon waking or the last voiced sighs before deep sleep in the evening (when the ribs and diaphragm achieve a different release).

• the non-semantic voice; the monstrous, the playful (which includes beat-boxing, a contemporary take on Manuel Garcia’s coup de glotte).

Levels of Vocal Progress: Cultural • Cultural bodies. All students bring a culture to actor training. Some need to take a

greater risk in the transformation of their tone, dialect/accent and to form a cultural response to this that is liberating.

• Anne Bogart’s view of– “embarrassment” is useful here; de-politicised. Part of this is ridding the actor of the shame of pronouncing “foreign” words incorrectly. Many cultures have the vestige of the colonial trope of mandatory hesitation before speaking “foreign” words or names. Actors must lose this to access other “worlds”.

• At the technical level of transforming the voice’s cultural ‘shape’, dialect is a collective decision about how a group of people are going to ‘cheat’ the shapes and patterns.

• Audiences need to recognise the accent but not its ‘perfection’. Because ultimately, there is no such thing as perfect speech in humans. Eg ‘cat’ is modified by aspiration in speech but phonetically it is ‘k-æt’.

• Guy Deutsche informs us on the language-speech tie. This same process happens alongside certain cognitions in cultural groups. In U.S. dialects – matter is voiced through, in east London matter is elided over. Otherwise, the sound becomes stylised in over-articulation – nobody ever speaks ‘the perfect’ phonetic version. We need to hear the shape of these patterns.

Accent/Dialect Work and Verse: Building on Levels of Progress

• In training actors in vowels / dialect / verse, there needs to be a concept of its SHAPE. The ur-tone changes with each accent – this shifts in every dialect. For example the ‘schwa’. The actor must move it for the new dialect–but the trained opera singer will be slow to do this due to vowel assimilation. Actors without good listening skills will struggle too.

• The framework of the breath has a shape – what you do with the breath, and shape of the mouth, including the oro-pharynx.

• The actor must have a concept of the shape – some artists have a synaesthetic approach to this.

• Accent/Dialect technique and Verse training are mirror opposites that enable the other. Accent is kinaesthetically fake but when it works physically, the actor gains the cognition of ‘truth’ in the text. Alternately, verse is cognitively ‘fake’ (an artifice), but the kinaesthetic faculty is what gives it momentum.

• The actor achieves the bond between how verse is ‘done’ and the meaning behind it. “It feels right and I understand it” and vice versa.

• If by Kipling has that conceit of movement as does Sea Fever – once that’s engaged with, actors feel it physically and its contrivance makes sense.

Technical Precision = Actor’s Creative Process

• How many times will a director say: "I don't want this rehearsal to be about the accent"? However the reality is that what the director really means is that s/he does not want the actors worried about getting the accent right.

• One of the arguments we make in this paper is that until the actor engages with the technical demands of the form, they cannot fully access the meaning of the text.

• Actor’s must engage from within, with what Cicely Berry calls the “muscularity of the word” so all the technical and physical demands of its delivery release the comprehension.

• In order to do this however, they need to release a deeper imaginative process of voice work that often falls into tension with notions of their own identity.

• An example of a cognitive-kinaesthetic success. The differing inflections, in the line “she’s getting it” from View from a Bridge anticipates a specific culture of listeners. Actors need to think in the accent as well as talking in it.

• Actors can kinaesthetically get it right, but if it is not cognitive, they will not achieve it. The difference is that stress and rhythm (like in verse) has to shift and this is done in the thinking, not just the doing.

• An example of the embodied nature of achieving ‘other voices’ is in Joan Washington’s approach of the ‘held jaw’ of Scottish dialects, based on image of Scotland’s cold climate. Washington asserts that accent is a geographical space, with landscape contours.

• Mark demonstrates the relationship between the direction of hand movements in conveying ethnicities in the voice.

Technical Precision = Case Studies

I am writing the performance?

• The student-actor, is a composer of their own vocal writing.

• The ideal is a spontaneous écriture sonore that leaves the playwright behind and lives in between their performance and an audience’s reception of that performance.

• Their voice, speech, plotting, invites the listener-spectator to rethink the authorship of the scene.

The Voice as Writing

• There is a burgeoning discourse now looking at the voice as writing (écriture).

• This builds upon Derrida’s account of the voice as the antipode of writing.

• For Derrida, writing is argued as the derivative of speech and voice. De la grammatologie (Paris, 1967).

• ‘Antipodes’ here is playful - the repressed and ‘colonised’ binary of vocalism, orality and aurality beneath print and mediated forms.

• Asking acting students to perform a canonical poem as a series of sounds can liberate them from the page (inverting Bhabha’s ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’.)

• Training the actor’s voice is on a spectrum – from basic phonation – chanting – singing – speech and all the vocal gestures in between. We have the de-voiced whisper up to the birthing roar (We credit Bernadette O’Brien for mentioning the latter concept in her paper).

• We relate to Catherine Palmer’s point of the different positions on this spectrum for training speech with musical theatre actor-singers.

• Certain challenges arise when training actors in Classical Verse. The imagined ur-language of Classical verse is away from vernacular, natural speech rhythms.

• The difference between the English (iambic pentameter) versus the French (the iambic hexameter) is encountered because of the open vowels at the endings in French. This is a mutual change in thinking and feeling if an actor must train in both English and French verse. This was highlighted in David Wiles’s paper.

• U.S. actors use the trochaic foot, eg Dustin Hoffmann’s struggle with Merchant of Venice documented on The Southbank Show. These are poetic constructs – a form of vocal ‘other’ that is culturally distinct and the actor must master each. This involves all levels – and the cultural shift is a ‘fake culture’ – an ur-rhythm that is a fiction of the past.

Verse – Vocal Vers(e)ions: Between Speech and Song

Voicing the other / radical self dialectic

• [Listening example]. The Wailing Wall – response to the visceral and now very stylised speech of early 20th century stage work: “horror”, “disturbing”.

• Individual student reaction: some voice(s) are so other than myself, the thing that has brought it into being as art (poesis) is both too real and too strange for me to incorporate into my own work comfortably. Collective response of the confident: bring it on! Art is ‘other than ourselves’.

• Paradox: it is my voice, but enhanced so that my ‘everyday’ voice is bolder - always open to an enhanced presence, blurring the boundary between the stage and the street….

Listening Example• (Cathy Berberian, Cathy’s Solo Talk Show 1979) ‘Ah, I’d like to have you hear what is called “The Wailing Wall”—it’s obviously a classic piece for the Hebrew theatre. It must have been recorded easily about fifty years ago by a famous actress of The Habima Theater and I heard it about … around ’56, ’57 for the first time…Luciano and I were extremely impressed by it. Then when he was working on Visage he gave me certain ideas that I was going to create at the moment—improvising—under his guidance. I was either inventing a language or I was exploiting a vocal gesture. For example, he’d say “alright now you start out with a total inability to communicate and then you work into a situation where you acquire phonemes, and you acquire several phonemes at a time and then you can make a comprehensible phrase and then you become social.”

The Sign of Progress

• Student-actors aspire to the standards of professional examples and coaches know this is a journey in building a complex skillset.

• Case study of one major TV actor….In coaching, he tested many versions of delivering the same piece text with a virtuosic ability.

• The sign of progress is when the actor knows s/he is most free / at best when they challenge the dialect/voice coach for more.

• The relationship is less ideal when the voice coach must instruct: “say it like this”.