Decentering Listening: Toward an Anti-Discriminatory Approach to Accent and Dialect Training for the Actor

ABSTRACT

This article reports on the findings of practice-based research into the development of anti-discriminatory accents and dialects training for actors with diverse intersecting identities. The author reviews an earlier strand of research into speech training within a UK conservatory that identified a bias toward Received Pronunciation reinforced by colonized listening practices. This article explores the impact of those listening practices on accent and dialect training. The author responds to the challenges inherent in providing training that both develops high-level skills and meets industry needs, while aiming to center the experiences of somatically othered students. The author develops their previous decolonizing model into a decentering framework for an approach to training actors that draws on critical pedagogy and asks students to cross the border from the conservatory into the community. This approach to accent and dialect training builds on verbatim and documentary theatre-making techniques, resulting in a practice that values empathy, listening, embodied practice, and autonomy, and the approach allows actors to perform “multiple authenticities,” while offering the potential for political insurgency within the performing arts industries.

KEYWORDS:

• Actor training
• accents
• dialects
• critical pedagogy
• anti-discriminatory
• diversity
• inclusion

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. “Training with a Difference,” American Theatre. (https://www.americantheatre.org/2018/01/04/training-with-a-difference/last accessed August 16 2019).

2. In linguistics, the term “accent” is used to refer to the variation in sounds that a speaker makes when speaking language, and dialect refers to word changes that speakers make, most commonly in reference to the geographical location of the speaker. This distinction is common among UK voice professionals. For voice professionals in the US and Australia, the term accent has been more commonly applied to the sounds that an L2 English Language speaker makes, and dialect is used to refer to variations in sound and words of L1 English language speakers. In this article, I have commonly used the term accent and dialect training as an overview of the subject area within actor training. Where I use the term accent on its own, I am referring to the sounds of speech by both L1 and L2 English language speakers.

3. Focus Group comments quoted in this article are not dated to avoid potential identification of individual students from a specific year group.

4. I detail the methodology in full in (Oram 2019, 281–2). Briefly, the process began with student focus groups, which led to an initial revision of the curriculum. This was followed up with further focus groups and revisions. Alongside this practice-based research, I gathered quantitative and qualitative data from structured interviews with directors, casting directors, agents, and voice coaches and conducted a survey of 58 actors who had been trained across a range of UK institutions.

5. Verbatim Theatre uses the recordings of live speakers as the basis for creating a dramatic presentation. Outside of the UK this is sometimes referred to as documentary theatre, a term that can extend to the use of non-recorded sources such as transcripts, diaries, and other artifacts. I will use the term verbatim across this article to refer to work that uses recorded speech.

6. In my research, I have shown that, in the UK, this is Received Pronunciation. Melissa Tonning-Kollwitz and Joe Hetterly (2018) state that in the United States, “right now in training, the default standard is middle class White American” (309).

7. Semantically, I prefer to refer to vocal identities rather than the more quantifiable and seemingly fixed idea of idiolect as it sits better with an intersectional approach that engages with multiplicity.

8. In my recent article on heuristic research processes, I describe how deep listening “involves attending to somatic experiences while listening; noticing things like the tightening of the solar plexus when a disagreeable statement comes up, or the warming comfort of agreement; taking time to experience being moved without immediately defending a position”(Oram 2020).

9. This has implications for the language of voice classes beyond the speech, accent, and dialect training discussed here. In short, I have moved away from liberal humanist rhetoric of neutral or natural toward a recognition of the performance of intersectional identities and a re-centering of vocal difference. I discuss this work in “The Heuristic Pedagogue: Navigating Myths and Truths in Pursuit of an Equitable Approach to Voice Training” (Oram 2020).

10. Critical pedagogy, feminist pedagogy, and anti-racist pedagogy are responses to education, which has often been exclusionary and functioned to assimilate students by normalizing dominant knowledge and values through the hidden curriculum (Kishimoto 2018, 541).

11. The UK teaching year is broken up into three teaching terms; OctoberDec, JanuaryMarch, April–June.

12. The scope for students to set their own goals in their assessment is another aspect of critical pedagogy and is additionally valuable in a diverse cohort which includes L2 English speakers. The assessment is pass/fail and the assessment criteria allows includes: “ability to adapt vocal usage to match that of the speaker,” “specificity and accuracy of accent and all other speech features,” “Ability to find an authentic physical embodiment of the original speaker,” “ability to adapt the original speaker’s level of communication to work effectively with a theatrical audience” (course documents, 2020).

13. The transcript is not assessed as this would necessitate a judgment of the validity of a personalized system. The efficacy of the system used should be evident in the final performance.

14. Details of this training can be found at https://ktspeechwork.org/about-the-work/(last accessed September 30 2020).

15. Leslie explained that she “traces correctness and its perpetration of a society of violence back to the first empire that centralized power and introduced good/bad, right/wrong that led to systems of punishment and therefore reactions of retaliation that developed and normalized a culture of violence.” She goes on to detail how “[f]irst contact/colonialism and genocide and its replications of centralized power in forced removal, forced servitude/enslavement and the oppressive patterns that continue today are embedded in what the dominate culture/white supremacy culture deem correct/good/right” (personal communication October 18 2020).

16. The performance is recorded so that comparisons with the source material are possible as part of the assessment process.

17. For many people who are dyslexic, phonological sequencing presents significant difficulties, and the use of symbols to represent sounds can be difficult for those people whose reading is affected by their dyslexic processing.

18. Pinyin is a respelling of Chinese characters using Roman script.

19. Along with RP, agents and casting directors, interviewed as part of this research, often described a desire for actors to have a “good” General American accent.

20. As Lanceta Coronel, Springfield, and Feliciano-Sanchez Moser point out, “it is impossible to predict what tools an actor will need over the course of their career” (2020, 4). The accents and dialect training outlined here does not attempt to cover all of those eventualities, but supports actors to develop an autonomous process in line with Lanceta Coronel, Springfield, and Feliciano-Sanchez Moser’s demands for “a variety of skills needed to function confidently and adaptably as artists in a broad, rapidly changing global industry” (2).

21. https://broadwaybaby.com/shows/dna/739,041 (accessed March 3 2019). All of the actors arrived at rehearsals having done their verbatim preparation and having applied that foundational accent work to the text. Our thanks go to accent coach, Joel Trill, for his support in collaborating with the actors to move this work into performance.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daron Oram

Daron Oram is a Principal Lecturer in Voice, working with students on both the BA acting: collaborative and devised theatre and the MA/MFA in voice studies: teaching and coaching programs at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Daron’s practice-based research focuses on anti-discriminatory training practices as well as the intersection of psychophysical approaches to acting and voice. In 2019 Daron was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in recognition of his research and scholarship. Daron is an alumnus of the Central voice course, a Designated Linklater Teacher, and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.