Generican Disease

I’ve had a fixation for the last week and a half:  What is unique about you?  

This isn’t a touchy-feelie thing - it’s marketing, damn it!  And it’s an ongoing issue for actors.  I think it’s the downside of training, sometimes.  Congratulations, you’ve learned a lot of technique, so now you do what you do better, but you have also learned how to turn off your humanity and be neutral enough that I recognize you’re doing a good job, but you’re boring.

I feel that I have the right to call your acting boring, by the way, because my acting is boring, too.  I’m the boring expert.  I don’t just act; I teach this shit, so I must know it well!  

This is a huge issue when I’m working with actors on speaking in General American.  (What is GA?  Approximately 147 more blog posts, so let it go for the moment.  You know what I’m saying.  Don’t be an argumentative voice teacher.)  GA is not just an accent; it’s also a style, and it’s not just speech; it’s also voice.  It requires efficiency of movement and it requires a vibrantly resonant voice and it requires appropriate articulation (as opposed to wacked-out over-articulation or mumbling.)  

But what it does, usually, is wash people out.  It’s a personality leech. 

“That’s accurate, but I don’t care.”  It kills theatre.  It’s why Shakespeare productions almost always suck - it’s one of the reasons, anyway.

So the challenge is Can you speak in Generican without losing You?  

You’re the one cast as Hermione, not one of the other 11 women they read for the role.  What do you bring to Hermione that no one else can?  (There is no Hermione, by the way - there’s only You as Hermione or Jennifer as Hermione.  Bob could play Hermione, too, but that’s a whole other concept.  Kind of hard to explain the pregnancy thing that way, too…)

It’s Generican season.  Get innoculated.  

Part 2 working with CJ on Welsh - start with part 1 below!

Working on Welsh with CJ!  CJ listened to a bit of Welsh via the AccentHelp download, and this is our first session to work on it - Part 1!

Time to Test Your Phonetics!

Someone designed a game to test your IPA skills.  (You should realize that it’s broad transcription, so the R’s are right-side up, for example.)  My only problem was actually spelling the words correctly in normal human spelling!  If only English had followed Shaw’s lead to simplify spelling!

You think saying “He must have hit her in her artery” in a Cockney accent is hard, try talking about the Icelandic volcano…

Proper Glaswegian Scottish!

How to download and learn a dialect through AccentHelp. See the purchasing and payment process, find out what emails you’ll receive and how to download the materials, and get a sneak peek at what our books look like.

Bad Accents: Better Off Not Trying?

I’m actually even more interested in the responses than the article itself.  One of my favorite responses is the comment that no one ever gets a Boston accent right in the movies, even from actors who are from Boston. 

Commenting on a question about the “Flat-A” sound and why even good speakers from NPR often default to this.

Great clip of Shirley Manson on the Craig Ferguson show.  Both are Scottish and talk about accents—they have pretty mean American accents, and Craig’s Michael Caine American rocks!  And she’s quite the sexy couch.

(I get a ton of these clips & links from Vastavox—from the Voice and Speech Trainers’ Association listserv.  Yeah, I’ve got nothing original to contribute, but I steal from the best…)