Session 6 - Accent Training

Today we had a session with an accent coach; this was such a beneficial experience for us as a company. I wouldn't say we were struggling with doing a strong American accent as a collective however if we want to make sure that we are sustained and specific in our voice work this is the kind of work we need to be taking part in.

I learnt a lot about where and how to place sounds in my mouth in order to have an authentic accent. The "mantra" was "Flat, Back and Wide". These three key words define how the accent is produced from the mouth. Flat because of the position of the tongue, back because the sound comes from the back of the mouth and wide because of the shape of the mouth. When learning this I had lot's of images conjured in my mind like open fields. This gave me a nice image to work with when imagining what mouth was doing when I was speaking in this dialect. This is a good way of getting into the accent as those words utilise the sound I need to make. I can use this as part of a vocal warm up in order to prepare the muscles in my mouth for the vocal work.

We also learned about the difference between a dark and light L were. This was established through the word "Little"The two L's in the word are different. The first one is light and the second one is dark. The second one is the one we are most interested - the "UL" sound is very present in the American dialect.

Now to put this into practice we did nursery rhymes in the accent. I chose "Hey Diddle Diddle" which in hind sight was a pretty difficult one; mainly due to the placement of the tongue for "Diddle". Nevertheless this exercise was very useful in pairing what we just learnt about accent training to a bit of simple text. To expand this work we need to move away from the nursery rhymes and apply this to Lucy Prebble's words. The accent coach said it would be beneficial to go through all of our lines and re-work them with the new vowels sounds we'd learnt in order to be 100% clear on all the words we say. This will make all our vocal work much more detailed and authentic moreover making the audience believe in our characters more.

The last advice we were given was to listen to the accent we are trying to replicate. Through YouTube or www.dialectsarchive.com I could listen to someone with that accent to make my grasp on the dialect as strong as possible. However this could be dangerous as I might just start mimicking a specific person instead of sticking to my characterisation of Skilling. I must be careful and use consistent sources.