Speech - The Musical Language of Vocabulary

When working on our performances, a large part of our line work may be the exploration of the accent that we believe our character to have. Speech is the music of language. Language has its roots in personality, individual, family, community, region and nation.

Today, we are lucky to be exposed to such great amounts of mass media communications and our ears can be tuned to many pieces of musical speech. We may not always understand the dialogue, of course, but the sound will affect our senses. For the purpose of this exercise, we are exploring English.

The English language today has many accents around the world and is re-produced in thousands of wonderful melodies. Through drama, we have the opportunity to explore those different melodies and the very existence of that opportunity shows how drama itself has developed from the earlier restrictions of "acceptable" forms of particularly practiced 'Queen's' or 'Standard' English, which is of course still included, but not exclusive.

Whatever melody our own background form of English plays, we need to learn to play our instrument, the voice, well enough to be understood and heard. Therefore it is wise to practice, and there are many exercises we can use to help us articulate.

The following articulation exercises are an introduction to exploring speech, and can be tried out in various different ways, including recital during physical exercises. Drama Workers/Directors may wish to include such exercises to their community theatre groups around the time they begin exploring the scripts of the playwrights with their drama members. It is a good idea though, to include Speech workshops as a regular part of your drama workshop activities. The art of speech is an important part of all theatre arts.

Vowel Practice - Monothongs

In Act III we see the Queen cross the seas with her fleet to realise a dream and reign supreme in the east. This scene must be seen to be believed.

Witty Kitty McQuittey spoke excellently at the committee meetings of the fifty city companies in which she was interested.

The messenger hesitated ere he went to fetch the ten red lead pencils from the desk.

Happy as a sand boy, Jack carried the captain's bat back to the pavilion.

Arthur Marks plans to co-star Margaret Carr and Charles Navarre in a drama set in the Harem of the Last Pasha.

A popular column writer offers a box of chocolate drops for a collection of society gossip.

An enormous audience saw the Maudlin play "The Haunted Hawthorn" written by that appallingly plausible author George York.

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