Personal Narrative: The Right To Speak

The Right To Speak: Working With the Voice - Habits

The chapters, ‘The Roots of Habits’ and ‘The Growth of Habits’ in Patsy Rodenburg’s book, truly opened my eyes to how our voice can be affected by our physical and emotional custom. Personally, it made me realise how I cannot take for granted the way in which I deliver my conversation in every day life and more importantly in my acting work. As an actress how I speak is vital, my job is to entertain an audience with the stories I tell, if I don’t have a voice people want to I will suffer greatly. Rodenburg’s word’s helped me grasp the difference between my natural and habitual way of speaking and how I can fix this.

In the book Patsy Rodenburg explains how “Habits physically manifest themselves as holds or barriers to the sound we make” this had a big effect on me and my mind instantly brought me back to an example of this. When I was eleven years old, I was asked to read a prayer at my Confirmation in front of hundreds of people. I was so excited for this until we had a rehearsal in the Church a week before the real ceremony, when it was my turn to practice I allowed my nerves to get the better of me. I completely choked, no words would come out of my mouth and I could feel my face
This can be a challenge as we are juggling a lot, between making sure our core is engaged, that we are focusing on a certain spot in the room visualising that something is really there and we must be ready to speak the text as soon as he signals it. During certain parts of the passage he might ask us to hold the position we are in but still speak even though our legs could be burning with pain or shaking we cannot let this come across in our speech, we must try keep our body relaxed and breathe at the correct moments of the text. This is where the skills and tools we have learned in Voice and Speech comes