by Rinda Frye
University of Louisville

I am fortunate to be teaching in what I think of as the theatre program of the future. We’ve all been hearing for a number of years now that in the near future the theatre will reflect the changing demographics in the United States which by the year 2050 will be populated by a majority of people of color. For those of us who teach theatre at the University of Louisville, that future is now.
We currently offer the only minor in African-American Theatre in the country and have begun discussing the future possibility of a major as well as a graduate certificate in African American Theatre within the MFA. The rapid growth of this program has changed the whole department, and for the better, I might add. Where once Caucasians were in the clear majority, now African-Americans make up half or more of our students, a change that has challenged me to rethink many of the ways I’ve taught voice over the years.
I’ve always been one of those teachers who felt uncomfortable with teaching standard American Stage diction. I was twelve when my family moved from Eastern Canada to Utah where I quickly adopted the local dialect so I would feel less of an outsider. But in university speech classes I learned to “speak properly” (meaning I imitated what I could remember of my Canadian speech) and found I no longer fit in with my family who had all adapted to the States and now found their fears confirmed: college had turned me into a snob. Once again I was an outsider.

As a young teacher, I didn’t want to impose this on my students. Theatre artists need to belong, to know the audience they speak to and for. Besides, who in the real world actually speaks standard American? And if you don’t speak it, is your speech sub-standard? The cultural issues are many here, involving social class and regionalism, as well as race. But, I thought, if I were preparing actors for the stage, and if directors and producers expect standard American (especially for classical pieces) I felt obliged to teach it, at least as an alternative dialect that they could use to “get work”.
So, in the second year of graduate voice work, as I began teaching the IPA, I would focus on diction work with a Standard model as the ideal. I always began with a lengthy proviso explaining my feelings about the politics of imposing normative speech on students, the need to belong, etc. My students would dutifully nod, and then as soon as I passed out the handouts and we began the IPA work, eyes would glaze over, faces would flush, and apologies for "getting it wrong" would fly out of their mouths because they did not come to this work as blank slates. Most of them had already been told, as undergraduates, or in high school, that something or other was "wrong" with their speech and regardless of what I said, that’s what they heard.

Now that I am older and teaching in a mixed race classroom, standardized speech seems even more absurd and sometimes downright cruel. (One of my students, who had been the only Black in his undergraduate theatre classes, talks about a teacher who would publicly record each student speaking a prepared piece. Every time this student “made a mistake,” the teacher would stop the tape and correct the error, making the student parrot back the correction until he "got it right." My student was devastated by this.) What is standard for these African-American students? I can no longer rationalize imposing Standard American diction even on the basis of preparing them for the professional stage. Most of my Black students will be working in professional Black theatres. To put it bluntly (in their words), there is no advantage to them to learn to "speak White"—quite the contrary. Sure they could be hired in traditionally White companies, but how often, and for what roles? If they are lucky enough to do an Othello, for instance, most companies will want an actor they can also cast in the piece for Black History month. I had to ask myself, “Is this really worth devoting a semester or more of time to; and more importantly, is it worth having to fight through the personal rage and humiliation in the room just to teach this dialect?”

Teaching standardized diction is based on the practice of correcting what is wrong with the student’s speech. So, I turned this premise on its head and began to teach students what is right and interesting about their speech. I asked them to direct their attention to what is unique and pleasurable about their voices and devised exercises to help them discover how their voices shift and change in different situations.

I begin the semester by teaching the IPA with Louis Colaianni’s pillows. If you haven’t seen these in use, get thee to a workshop. They are nothing short of miraculous. The students love them. Where in the past, students would groan on IPA days, now they moan when I don’t bring the pillows to class. They practically teach themselves. I design games with the pillows and only rarely get to teach them because the students make up their own. What used to take three months to teach (and truthfully, some students simply panicked and never got it) now takes about a month—mostly because it’s fun and I don’t have to teach through all that fear and self-loathing.

I also start early with a simple observation exercise based on spontaneous movement work. The class pairs off with partners. Half the group is blindfolded and told they may move or not as they wish, but to move only out of need or desire. Their partners observe them, intervening only to prevent injury. Observations are noted in a journal and then shared with the partner. Then the partners trade off. For the second part of the exercise, the
blindfolded partners again may move only out of need or desire, but this time they must allow the movement to suggest a sound. Again, both partners observe the other, make journal notes about their discoveries, and share those with each other.

A couple of weeks later, we do an imitation exercise based on a wonderful movement exercise I learned from Susan Dibble, a fabulous movement teacher at Shakespeare and Company. Again, they pair off. One partner is the actor, the other the director. The director teaches the actor 3 or 4 physical postures that are typical of the director’s own way of moving. For each posture, the director then supplies a phrase or simple sentence to go with it. They work together until the director has satisfactorily modeled his/her own behavior and voice on the actor. Then the actor works alone to supply what he/she sees as the inner life or truth of the role (how he/she interprets the character), and then the actors perform this piece for the class.

After the performance, they close their eyes and I play slow music while the director stands behind the actor and dances him/her. And again, they trade off.

Then we begin work on a more complex imitation exercise. This one I based on lessons learned from my teacher Bob Barton at the
University of Oregon, and further shaped by some ideas from Louis Colaianni’s donor voice exercise. Each person must ask two others in the class for permission to observe and imitate their voices. For a month they work together, videotaping, writing down observations in their journals, analyzing one another’s voices in terms of word choice, rhythm, emphasis and dialect, observing the relationship
between body language and voice, all the while comparing the observed voice with their own. They try to capture their subjects in casual conversation, when excited or under stress, and in performance. I encourage them to notate what they hear, as much as possible, in IPA. At the end of this process, they perform the imitations in class and discuss their observations. The person being imitated also participates in this conversation, offering responses and critiques. Each student hears two versions of his/her voice alienated by a respectful, though necessarily imperfect imitation. And each student learns the complexity of other voices as he/she tries to shift his/her own speech habit to achieve another.

When observing and imitating one another, all personal dialects are valuable. The openness of Kentucky or Georgia vowels are helpful to the tight jaws and tongues of the Michigan and Wisconsin speakers. And most students take great pains to capture their subjects well. As one student noted, “I see this as not just an exercise in paying attention to what my mouth does to form sounds, but in character study and doing justice to a role.”
By this point in the class, their ears have been sharpened incredibly and they are extremely sensitive to nuances in their own voices and speech patterns, but I still haven’t taught them Standard American diction. Then I teach them their first accent: Standard Stage British (received Southern). I spend class time teaching the whole group and then devote time to individual coaching, working from the IPA and making tapes available to them. They then must apply the accent to a monologue of their own choosing, notating the substitutions in IPA in their journals. But what I haven’t told them is that the notion of substitutions is based on the premise that they already speak Standard American. Some realize this during coaching sessions. But most discover this when performing in class when I point out the places where their own dialects or speech patterns have interfered with the Stage British. We work through these places until they are able to use the British dialect. I then give them their only lesson in Standard American Stage by asking them to keep the resonance forward in the mask (as in the British), but to add back in some of the American substitutions. In almost every case, they’re able to do this fairly quickly and painlessly and without all the cultural baggage that used to go with it, because the Standard American is just another dialect that they can use or not, as they choose.

Teaching in a multi-cultural classroom is truly a gift and a constant challenge. I’m still revising, changing, and making up new exercises as I go along. I’ve had to rethink my standard of requiring two European accents and two American dialects. Instead, I let the students choose accents or dialects that they will be likely to use in the future. I’m still hearing Irish, Italian, and German, but also Trinidadian, Nigerian, and Puerto Rican. I have to work a little harder and more flexibly to hear and critique several different dialects for each assignment, but the variety of sounds in the
classroom is a treat in itself. As I bemoan the lack of good dialect tapes for African Americans (what, after all, is Stearn’s “Black African?” As one student exclaimed, “It’s a continent, for God’s sake!”). I can’t wait for new samples to be posted to the IDEA web site, and I have all my students collecting at least one sample of a useful dialect for themselves to share with the whole class and to build our libraries.