EFFECTIVE SPEECH TRAINING FOR THE THEATRE STUDENT-ACTOR

Abstract

The article describes an approach for dealing with the complexity of stage speech for articulation, pronunciation and clarity of the student-actor. Many times the actor may be relatively fluent but remain quite inaccurate in articulation and enunciation. The pronunciation is often thought of as being "fossilized" (Selinker, 1972), highly resistant to change. This tendency for high resistance to change on the part of the average student-actor is the main impetus for this paper, which focuses on training the student-actor to acquire the skills for intelligibility and accuracy and vocal effectiveness. This entails vital and specific skills about emotion building i.e. character portrayal as it affects voice, diction, and the instinct to sway the audience. In order to express this, we take a brief look at the Alexander Technique from his habitual point of view, a practical and theoretical approach, and the significance is for the development of the total actor for vocal performances; for the effective use of the speaking voice and accent training for reflecting any linguistic varieties. Unique about the article is the discourse on the proficiency of the student-actor to unlearn old habits of speech production, delivery, movement, posture, acquired from either the mother tongue or habits. By learning linguistic peculiarities and the skill of substitutions. the student-actor develops the capacity to create new characters for play productions, suiting the personality to the role being played