The Moment of Speech

Creative Articulation for Actors

Annie Morrison

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350107922
• eBook ISBN: 9781350107939
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

Annie Morrison, creator of the Morrison Bone Prop, abandons the notion that language and thought are mainly processed in the left cerebral hemisphere, and coaches the actor to speak from the heart. Through this method, words acquire physical properties, such as weight, texture, colour and kinetic force. Think about Martin Luther King, Mao Zedong or Malala Yousafzai; potent speech impacts external events. And internally, it forms and shapes the world of the speaker. Seeing articulation as a purely mechanical skill is detrimental to an actor's process: it is crucial to understand what language is doing on a biological level. This workbook is invaluable for actors, both professional and in training, and also for voice and speech teachers.

1

INTELLIGIBILITY

Being articulate – it’s all movement

Articulation is not elocution! Articulation is not RP. Applied to the body, ‘articulate’ means ‘united by a joint,’ allowing movement. Applied to the body of language, it means ‘divided into distinct and significant parts, i.e., speaking intelligibly’ (OED). Speaking intelligibly means moving the articulators well in your own or another’s speech system. To do this well the muscles in the middle ear need to be in balance.¹

The ‘ear of the body’ is the vestibular or balance apparatus; it is your compass and detects low-frequency sound. The ‘ear of hearing’ is the cochlea, which processes audible sound through the movement of minute hairs. The ear is set up to detect speech as movement.

Articulating bones allow us to move through space. Articulating voice allows us to move thoughts through the air. Emotion moves feeling within us; voice moves feeling beyond us. Speech marries feeling and thought. Voice and speech together move others when you speak from the heart.

Language is symbolic and conceptual, but articulated language connects it to the earthiest part of our bodies – the bones: at a deep level, a connection between spirit (breath) and matter (body). Your feet walk over the earth; your speech ‘walks’ invisibly, through the air. You are encouraged to move when speaking text to ‘get the words off the page’, out of your head and into your body, but ultimately bodily movement is transformed into vocal movement.

Speech training in drama schools is now richer and more celebratory of all the accents of English; it is more respectful of difference and diversity. Being articulate has nothing to do with accent or dialect. As your articulators become more flexible, your ears become attuned to a wide variety of the rhythms and tunes of different speech systems, which broadens the range of characters you can play.

How intelligible are you in your mother tongue?

I’d like you to take the audio equivalent of a snapshot of your speech to establish a baseline of your intelligibility in your own speech system. It’s only an exercise, but it will get you thinking more objectively about speaking and, if you haven’t already started doing this, begin the habit of reflexive practice.

Be as creative as you like and remember there is no such thing as ‘lazy speech’. To get you going here is a basic scale of 1–10:

Draw a few lines in your journal, like the one below.

1 _________________________________________10

Each line represents different sets of listeners and situations, so label each one e.g.,

• At home with family

• With friends

• Peer group

• Formal situations such as college, work, reading text aloud, etc.

a) Rate on a scale of 1–10 how effectively you speak in each one.

1 = people never understand me

5 = people ask me to repeat myself half the time

10 = people always understand me

b) Make notes about how mood, tiredness, feelings and situation affect your speech.

c) Ask others how they rate you.

d) Record yourself talking to a friend, describing something, as well as reading aloud.

Remember, these are just ideas to get you going. When you repeat this exercise at the end of term, or after a year, you might be surprised to find how much you’ve extended your range, how much easier it is for you to express yourself, or how rarely people ask you to repeat yourself.

If you score 10 in all your conversations why do you need to do anything about your articulation? With that question in mind, read on …

Old Tongue

By Jackie Kay

When I was eight, I was forced south.

Not long after, when I opened

my mouth, a strange thing happened.

I lost my Scottish accent.

Words fell off my tongue:

eedyit, dreich, wabbit, crabbit

stummer, teuchter, heidbanger,

so you are, so am ur, see you, see ma ma,

shut yer geggie or I’ll gie you the malkie!

My own vowels started to stretch like my bones

and I turned my back on Scotland.

Words disappeared in the dead of night,

new words marched in: ghastly, awful,

quite dreadful, scones said like stones.

Pokey hats into ice cream cones.

Oh where did all my words go –

my old words, my lost words?

Did you ever feel sad when you lost a word,

did you ever try and call it back

like calling in the sea?

If I could have found my words wandering,

I swear I would have taken them in,

swallowed them whole, knocked them back.

Out in the English soil, my old words

buried themselves. It made my mother’s blood boil.

I cried one day with the wrong sound in my mouth.

I wanted them back; I wanted my old accent back,

my old tongue. My dour soor Scottish tongue.

Sing-songy. I wanted to gie it laldie.

Mother tongue

At birth your lungs opened like parachutes and you arrived on dry land after floating for nine months in a sonic underwater world.

The personal soundscape you’d been enjoying since you were the size of a king prawn was the music of your mother tongue accompanied by the polyrhythmic interplay of you and your mother’s heartbeats, punctuated with the whistles, pops and whooshes of tubes and organs surrounding you in symphonic harmony.²

From the moment you landed you got hold of the world through your lips and tongue, feeding the deep instinctual drive to survive.

Neuroscientists call the tongue the ‘royal road to the brain’. In their attempts to discover more about neuroplasticity they use the tongue to stimulate changes in the brain. It is the largest sense organ in your body and scientists have discovered that electrical stimulation of the tongue is the fastest way to induce these changes.³ From infancy your tongue is helping your brain grow – ‘thinking’ with your tongue’s haptic senses and your ears, to the tune of your mother’s voice.

Six months on, you’re babbling away in the clearly definable tune of your ‘mother tongue’. Now as an actor, you strive to tap into the residues of your pre-linguistic self, to the muscle memory of thinking with your tongue. The exercises in this book will help you do this.

Mother tongue! Just think about that – your tongue giving birth to words, to language. The spirit of breath uniting with the wet tongue to give new life to each word uttered.

Mother tongue is your first language or speech system, spoken at home by you and your family – your family identity. Outside the home your speech changes to fit in with your friends – your group identity. At school you conform to a standardized version of English – your formal identity. However you adapt the way you speak to fit in, always bear in mind you have a choice whether or not to be defined by it. As an actor, speech adaptability is key to transformation. Artists can transcend the limitations of cultural identity.⁴

The relationship between language and culture can be fraught especially if your parents were born in a different country to the one you are brought up in. In many of his poems Dan Vera, born to Cuban parents in south Texas, movingly expresses the conflict that comes from dislocation from one’s roots. Here is his poem ‘Wiri Wiri’:

Wiri Wiri

By Dan Vera

The language holds us together.

How you are bathed in it

till you tire and run

or are pushed away from the tongue

by parents who’d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Creative articulation
• 1 Intelligibility
• 2 Fundamentals
• 3 Centring
• 4 Releasing tension
• 5 Exploring the articulators
• 6 Exploring sounds
• 7 Troublesome sounds
• 8 Connected speech
• 9 Poetry
• 10 Drills and euphonic word lists
• APPENDIX I: Vocal health
• APPENDIX II: Additional eye exercises
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Permissions
• Index
• Imprint