All There in My Mouth Somewhere

There is a very fat gecko that hunts on my office windows. It has an executive attitude to life. It allows its prey to come to it, and merely opens and closes its mouth at need. If the opening and closing of my own mouth was so profitable to me, I would be fat too and happy with it, and the rest of the world of no inconvenience or account.

I once swallowed a bug whilst on stage in Stawell. It had a different effect on me that it ever had on the gecko. It is a sure indicator that you know your lines if you can gulp all six legs down and still know what comes next. To a normal person, what comes next is not pretty to describe, but theatre people are not normal and we take such things in our stride (though many of us are not pretty to describe whatever the circumstances).

When I was working mostly as a director, I used to prefer to use professional and amateur actors and people that had never acted before all in the same cast. I found that the cross fertilisation brought interesting results; technique that might otherwise hide truthfulness was often sandblasted away, truthfulness that might be otherwise dumbfounded was often given a voice, and the arrogance that besets us all was rarely allowed to settle for long before being overthrown by facts - my own arrogance in particular.

The commonest question that the non-actors had was how they should learn lines. Everyone confronted with this has their own preferred method to teach. Mine involves double and triple pacing so that the body learns, by muscle memory, the noises to make; only later giving the mind the freedom to turn those noises into words. It’s an old repertory and vaudeville technique, to which I have sometimes found curious resistance amongst mainstreamers, but which is usually more useful to more people than otherwise.

It is the technique that I use when learning my own shows, whether drawn from The Bible, from Heritage or of my own invention. It is important to work the mouth as fast as possible, with no regard the normal relationships between breath and speech. In other words, gush for as long and as fast as you can within one breath, regardless of the lexical or grammatical meaning, taking new breaths as needed, not according to the natural pauses of the speech.

As with most things, I have found that it is not so straightforward as I had hoped to adapt my work from the stage to the microphone. Opponents of the fast-pace technique often point out that coarticulation problems can be reinforced rather than addressed when working at speed. They are right, but there are warm-up exercises that adjust for this.

Co-articulation is the blurring of sounds in the mouth. It is what keeps human speech sounding human. Machines cannot do it, and so they can be very hard to understand when producing words from the individual phonetic units from which they are composed. The human ear reads coarticulation for all sorts of information - mood, place of origin, intimacy, aesthetics, credibility and so on. A live audience is incredibly forgiving of highly blurry co-articulation - so long as they come from the same dialect - because there are many physical cues that collaborate with it.

The microphone records the blurriness accurately - which the brain does not do - and so the ear becomes puzzled later during play back because the sounds sound like something that should be clear, but actually aren’t. What the ear hears is a fascinating tale tangled up intolerably somewhere between the uvula and the teeth.

I have spent the past few weeks doing old fashioned, Received English style elocution exercises to clear the excess blurriness away. The result - which is why I do not favour this from a directorial point of view - is that it has dragged the voice forward and up. This is not an unaccustomed place for the Australian accent, but it is not the loveliest place either. I prefer my voice further back and lower in the mouth. That is, I prefer a dark rather than a light voice. At present, dark is where all my co-articulation problems are.   

I have been working on some short recordings to act as a ‘soundtrack’ on the site. There is a wonder and a satisfaction in hearing a sound deep inside your head, and then finding ways to it in the outside world, where you are not actually the hero of all that you can dream. I had created the electronic environment, but been unable to get the voice that suited it.

I have been so long on the stage that I have forgotten to speak off-voice, but when I was on the radio off was my norm. When I recovered this voice - very far back, very low down, as black as chocolate or cigars - then the electronics kicked in and the whole thing turned to gold and silk.

Listening back to what I have wrought has been a time of triumph - and occasionally I look up, and there is that satisfied gecko hanging on the flyscreen and all his problems have been taken care of too.

Noël Christian
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