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The Passionate Speaker
"The lyf so short, the craft so long to learne."
- G. ChaucerA Newsletter for Speakers By Michael Landrum August, 2003 — Number 56 Clyde For speakers the skill of presenting is best achieved when least noticed. As with many other performing arts, the goal is an air of effortlessness that belies the hard work of preparation. Some speakers feel that they should be able to toss off a keynote without preparing, that they need not work on their voice, diction, posture or other expressive tools. This is a misconception that arises from mistaking the natural with the familiar. My dear departed mentor and friend Clyde Vinson was my teacher, director and guide to the wider world of art, literature and acting. I met Clyde at Wayne State University where I had gone to join a Shakespearean repertory company as a twenty-year-old acting student. Clyde, a tall, raw-boned Texan, was an unlikely looking professor who taught oral interpretation or how to speak from a written text. For me and many others, his classes became the most important lessons on the arts of acting, speaking, thinking, understanding, communicating and living. "You may glimpse someone's soul by looking into their eyes," he once said, "but if you really want to know what's going on in there, listen to the tone of their voice." He made us aware of the true beauty and power of the spoken word. He showed us how to strengthen, flex, stretch and relax the intricate muscles of that amazing instrument which we all carry in our throats, and which we had never appreciated until we met him. He showed us how the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of life converged in the voice. Our voices were the link between our bodies, hearts, minds and each other. We breathed into our feet, into the spaces between our bones, into the domes of our skulls and the tiny tubes of our hair. The cycle of life was reflected in respiration, perspiration, inspiration and expiration. Then there was diction. "Very slim, very small, very trim, very tall, very beautiful." Over and over until the r's tripped off the tongue with just the proper "mid-Atlantic" flutter, purged and combed of the snarls and cockle-burrs of our American regionalism, but pulling up short of the British "veddy". We exercised with long passages from Shakespeare to increase our lung capacity; we shouted and whispered and spoke thirty kinds of gibberish. We formed a theatre of our own, called The Court Players, performing at the Detroit Institute of Arts in a courtyard that evoked the Italian renaissance. At that point we learned Clyde's most important lesson: to render all our work invisible. "No one's going to buy a ticket to see you breathe properly," he told us. "The audience will only notice your diction if it's lousy. What they are interested in is what happens in the play, your characters actions and intentions, what they think and say and do. Make those things clear and true, and you will have done your job." It's true for speaking as for most endeavors. 90% of the work should disappear, be taken for granted, go unappreciated, even. When you enter a well made building, you should not be noticing the wiring, the plumbing, the insulation or the footings. You and that building have a purpose in common at that moment, and that purpose should eclipse all else. A speech should be an effortless communication. If the audience becomes aware of the effort, practice and preparation that went into creating it, the speaker has failed. The purpose of a speech is the result it creates for the audience, not the process the speaker uses to get there. I remember the moment I finally grasped that lesson. I had been working on a speech from Shakespeare's Richard II, and I mean working. Finally Clyde said, "Oh, forget all that hollow-headed bellowing and just tell me the truth as you understand it." I dropped the acting and spoke the lines in a simple, unforced way, from my self. "There." Clyde said. "You mean, that's all I have to do? Just trust myself?" Clyde pointed to my heart. "Who else is in there for you to trust?" A Thought to Ponder "A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time." -- Mark Twain ©2001-2003 Michael F. Landrum |
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