Training Actors' Voices

Towards an Intercultural/Interdisciplinary Approach

Tara McAllister-Viel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351613903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Contemporary actor training in the US and UK has become increasingly multicultural and multilinguistic. Border-crossing, cross-cultural exchange in contemporary theatre practices, and the rise of the intercultural actor has meant that actor training today has been shaped by multiple modes of training and differing worldviews. How might mainstream Anglo-American voice training for actors address the needs of students who bring multiple worldviews into the training studio? When several vocal training traditions are learned simultaneously, how does this shift the way actors think, talk, and perform? How does this change the way actors understand what a voice is? What it can/should do? How it can/should do it?

Using adaptations of a traditional Korean vocal art, p'ansori, with adaptations of the "natural" or "free" voice approach, Tara McAllister-Viel offers an alternative approach to training actors' voices by (re)considering the materials of training: breath, sound, "presence, " and text. This work contributes to ongoing discussions about the future of voice pedagogy in theatre, for those practitioners and scholars interested in performance studies, ethnomusicology, voice studies, and intercultural theories and practices.

1

CONVERSATIONS AND METHODOLOGIES

Embodiment, interculturalism, and practice-as-research

In many of the conversations in “natural/free” voice training texts and interviews, “the human voice” is the “same everywhere” (Rodenburg 1992: 107, 268) and “the voice is the voice” (Berry 2010: 122) regardless of linguistic or cultural context. Anatomy and physiology is key to transferring the exercises between bodies/voices from different cultures and languages. In this way, discourses surrounding embodiment training and interculturalism meet in the voice studio. However, this approach to border-crossing has been heavily criticized for privileging anatomy over cultural influence and has therefore been characterized as an “effacement of cultural and other kinds of difference” that attempts to “transcend cultural conditioning” in favor of “universal” anatomical experience (Knowles 100, emphasis in the original). One aim of this chapter is to examine some of these conversations and offer a more complex discussion of the relationship between culture and voice. Second, I propose that practice-as-research provides a viable methodological approach to investigating this area. A third aim is to offer the reader a basis for understanding the rationale behind the structure of this research within a given historic and artistic context.

Embodiment: The role of vocal anatomy in the “natural/free” voice approach

Rodenburg wrote in her first book, “Whatever their cultural differences the voice of every culture works in the same manner. The biology, mechanics and hydraulics of the human voice are the same everywhere” (1992: 107). This reasoning invests in the body as a stable site for learning. Later in the same book, she also insisted that “The anatomical principles of the voice are the same in each place, the main body of sound the same (1992: 268).” My overseas experience led me to different conclusions.

The anatomy of my voice was different from the anatomy of my KNUA students’ voices or the voices of my p’ansori teachers. Age, gender, and behaviors, like smoking, influence the physical properties and function of our voices. Our discipline-specific training had also altered our voices. Later, I discuss how the “natural/free” voice training permanently alters the way the body/voice functions by borrowing understandings of body function from the Alexander Technique to produce a “free” voice. In a similar way, p’ansori training permanently alters the way the body/voice functions through its practice, producing the sŏngŭm [sound/voice] of p’ansori.

It was clear to me that the sounds in the Korean language,¹ particularly the placement of the sounds towards the back of the mouth, as well as the “tension-filled” sounds² in p’ansori, did not comprise a “main body of sound” (Rodenburg 1992: 268) accessible to me when I first arrived in Seoul. The articulation exercises in the training texts I brought with me from the US, particularly those that were influenced by British pedagogy, instructed the placement of sound forward in the mouth, or “trippingly on the tongue”³ or view the performer’s voice as alighting from this forward placement in order to travel a distance when “projecting” the voice in a theatre. These were not placements that were necessarily useful to my Korean-speaking students. Berry wrote:

In Seoul, South Korea, I found that the sound of the language itself was something I had to deal with: it sounded to me a much more stressed language, more emphatic, and that stress so often came from the throat.

(Berry 2001: 58)

Here, I am not referring to “speech principles,” which “tend to differ just like musical principles” (Rodenburg 1992: 268). Instead, I am referring to the understanding of sound and sound placement that is felt by the speaker and interpreted by the listener as a cultural act.

Steven Connor suggested that sound has a “phonopolitical” function and specifically reflected on sounds produced in the “back of the mouth,” in this instance, the characterization of German as a “guttural language.” He wrote that the depiction of German as “guttural” was a “prejudice” that “has roots that reach much further back, having to do with the growing inhospitality of English to sounds produced in the back of the mouth.” He argued that “the values of particular sounds and the vocal methods used to employ them often have this phonopolitical force and function” (2014: 11). The eum-yang design of “dark” and “bright” vowel sounds in Korean addresses a philosophical and political understanding of sound in language, which encompasses more than the “speech principles” (Rodenburg 1992: 268) to which Rodenburg referred. Later I will discuss the design of the Korean language, its use of pure Korean words and Sino-Korean words,⁴ and its “phonopolitical form and function,” as well as an understanding of sound in p’ansori that differs from an Anglo-American model of “projecting” the voice during performance.

Rodenburg’s quotes seemed to focus on the anatomy of the voice as physical properties of the vocal tract. Of course, the vocal tract is not the only site for what is understood as the voice. The voice exists as vibrations that can be felt throughout the vocalist’s body as primary and secondary resonance and as vibrations during transmission from vocalist to listener, either through bodily contact or through the air and into the ear. The voice exists within the ear of the listener as a physical property. The voice also exists as electric synapses that carry meaning to the brain. Communication is part of the function of the voice, realized as physical properties, between bodies, not simply within one body (the vocalist).⁵ Voicing is both a singular and plural phenomenon. It is “my” voice but does not exist solely in “my” body. This raised for me questions about the relationship between one’s own body/voice and the transmission between bodies/voices during voice training, or more simply, issues surrounding “embodiment.”

Rodenburg’s and Berry’s assertions can be understood within the larger key principle of the “natural/free” voice approach that insists the voice is “embodied,” literally “in” and “of” the body. Anatomy and physiology is understood as the common denominator that links human experience. Berry wrote, “That is why I said that our common ground was the experience of the voice through the movement of muscles” (Berry 1973: 14). The body becomes the site for the voice, the producing mechanism for sounding and voicing, and the kinesthetic awareness of physical acts that influence the training of voice. In short, the body mediates the experience of experiencing voice.

Linklater wrote, “The voice is forged in the body” (Linklater 2016: 59). In the “natural/free” approach, the body tends to be one that is conceptualize through a Western, bio-medical model.⁶ However, voice and its potential change considerably when the concept of body changes. At KNUA, I often had conversations with my students about the types of voices they admired: “I want a ‘thick’ voice.” Several times I found written in their vocal self-assessments, “I have a metallic sound.” Word choice reflected an understanding of voice and vocal function based, in part, on a particular concept of body. In Korean traditional medicine, o haeng (lit. o/five haeng/road or function) is an understanding of certain natural principles and their function within a body. Wood, fire, earth, metal, water were understood as physical properties including firmness, fluidity, body-heat, and mobility. If “metal” is realized as a physical property in the body that can have an effect on sound quality then a “metallic sound” is an aural/oral reality, not simply a descriptive metaphor.⁷

Phillip Zarrilli wrote,

We organize ‘the world’ we encounter into significant gestalts, but ‘the body’ I call mine is not a body, or the body, but rather a process of embodying the several bodies one encounters in everyday experience as well as highly specialized modes of non-everyday, or ‘extra-daily’ bodies of practices such as acting or training in psycho-physical disciplines to act.

(2004: 655)

Many of my KNUA students viewed their bodies through different mappings of body and this necessarily changed how we talked about the process of “embodying” voice, eventually shaping the developing training exercises.

Conversations surrounding “embodiment” in voice training offer larger issues for voice trainers, not only for those who choose to teach cross-culturally. Many trainers and speech and language therapists work with voices that have changing, multiple relationships to body[ies].⁸ If voice is “embodied,” literally sited in the body, then whose “body” did Stephen Hawking’s voice belong to? Hawking, who suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease [amyotrophic lateral sclerosis] communicated using a DecTalk DTC01 voice synthesizer, an assistive communication device (Greenmeier 2009).⁹ He could not communicate with his biological voice and his SGD was not located in his body. Users may choose a voice that comes with their device or can record and add new voices. Voice teachers and speech and language therapists grapple with anatomy and voice when working with cancer patients. Cancer patients who have had a total laryngectomy, or their larynx completely removed, will have undergone surgery to have their windpipe (trachea) separated from their esophagus so that they can no longer force air from their lungs through their mouth to speak. Of the alternative ways of speaking after surgery, patients may be able to use a voice prosthesis (trachea esophageal puncture or TEP), create esophageal speech by swallowing air, or use an electrolarynx, which is a battery-operated machine that produces sound for the patient. Words can be formed when pressing the electrolarynx against the neck and moving the tongue and mouth to form the sound into words (Cancer Research UK 2015).

In these instances, the patient can “voice” using their own biology—in other words their “voice” is sited in their body- but what is traditionally understood as a “voice,” sound resulting from vibrations of the vocal folds within the larynx, no longer applies. These examples provoke questions not only about where the voice is sited but also what is voice?

Finally, the writings of voice trainer and transgender actor Rebecca Root¹⁰ exemplify another aspect of the instability of the body. When her body transitioned from male to female she wanted to “acquire the sort of voice which would not attract unwanted attention as a TS person, marking me out as a target for ostracism or homophobic behavior.” As a TS actor she was often “cast as a ‘token’ TS person, expected to look like one gender but sound like another” (2009: 144, emphasis in the original). She asked,

What makes a person’s voice sound male or female and how are those differences reproduced on stage or in life? Is gender identity governed by psychological impulse, overruling the bodily (and vocal) appearance? To paraphrase de Beauvoir, can we become men and women?

(2009: 146, emphasis in the original)

Her experiences with multiple bodies led her to ask questions of voice training, and importantly for this discussion here, what is the relationship between bodies and voices?

Alexandros Constansis has theorized his sung voice during his experience transitioning and in his article “The Changing Female-to-Male (FTM) Voice,” proposed that the FTM voice, “has wider implications … to do with the ‘biology of culture’; or, to put it another way, with conceptions of ‘the natural’” (Constansis 2009). The anatomy of his voice was altered through a drugs protocol (2003–2004) and supported with training techniques Constansis tested first on himself and later taught to his transgender clients. In the field of Voice Studies, “the study of voice quality in transgendered individuals can shed light on how far vocal plasticity can be pushed to overcome the limitations inherent in vocal anatomy” (Kreiman and Sidtis 2011: 144).

Transgender professional vocalists are concerned not only with off-stage uses of voice, or issues of “passing” in order to avoid unwanted attention, but also with on-stage vocal performance. In Root’s case, she is interested in character voice construction as a TS actor. She plays “Judy,” a transgender character on BBC 2’s sitcom Boy Meets Girl (BBC Television). In her writing, she cited other artists who also construct character voices for performance, such as actor Ernesto Tomasini’s internet project “in which he performed vocally as ‘Monica’: a sexy Italian housewife. For the men with whom he interacted the lure was her voice: ‘the voice became a body, even though there was no body’” (2009: 149). Here, Tomasini’s voice “created” a body for and with the listener. How a voice is recognized and how a “body” is assigned to a given voice is a complex process. Kreiman and Sidtis ask, “Can we hear what a speaker looks like?” They wrote,

Because of the linkage through the speech chain between physical characteristics and perceived voice quality, listeners often treat voice quality as a cue to a speaker’s physical characteristics, and make judgments about physical size, sex, age, health, appearance, racial group, or ethnic background, based on the sound of a voice. Such judgments are common on the telephone and are actively exploited in animation and radio advertising, where voices are the only cue available to the speaker’s physical attributes.

(2013: 110)

Later, in Chapter Six, I introduce studies by Korean phonetician Moon Seung-Jae, which my students and I used in the Namdaemun Market Projects when (re)considering how sound carried cultural meaning in voice and the cues to a speaker’s identity. So, the physical attributes of a voice and what a voice can do (anatomically and physiologically) are received by a listener who has certain expectations about what a voice should do, or “social expectation influences listeners’ judgements” (2013: 111). Voicing and listening involve production and reception models that cannot be based solely on anatomical function. The “voice of every culture” does not “work[s] in the same manner (Rodenburg 1992: 107, emphasis added).”

Within actor training, the construction of character voices raises similar questions about the site of the voice, how voices “work,” what a voice is, and whose voice is it. At KNUA, RCSSD and East 15, a standard part of my voice curriculum is the study of “character voices” to ready students for employable skills in voice-overs for commercials, voices for animation, voices for avatars in the gaming industry, voices for storytelling [in which a singular storyteller embodies multiple characters as they do in p’ansori], radio dramas, audiobooks, and voices for puppetry, as well as voices in which the student must acquire a particular accent/dialect. Often student-actors will produce a voice reel, which is a series of short recorded texts demonstrating the student’s vocal versatility for future employers.

In studying character voices, students ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Conversations and methodologies
• 2 What is the “natural/free” voice approach?
• 3 What is sŏngŭm [성음] in p’ansori [판소리]?
• 4 The role of breath in training actors’ voices
• 5 The role of “presence” in training actors’ voices
• 6 Text/vocal text
• Conclusion
• Index