Remote Possibilities

The other day I was talking with an NGO executive who was concerned about the environmental impact of all her air travel for speaking engagements in different cities. This reminded me of an excellent article by UBC Math Professor, Malabika Pramanik, whom I had the pleasure of working with at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.

Environmentalists, academics, executives, artists…people in many sectors are turning to alternatives like video conferencing. Yes, there are constraints (Professor Pramanik describes some of them), and no, the technology is not perfect. But, as my wonderful colleague Matt Smith of Adrenaline Studios points out, “it’s just a bandwidth issue right now.” And “right now” moves pretty fast in the tech world. As the picture gets clearer and the glitches are fewer and farther between, I believe this way of working will become a more regular part of our lives. And this is actually a good thing.

I won’t get too heavy about the environmental impacts of air travel. I won’t go on about how many younger people already use these options to connect across distances, and I don’t hear them grumbling about it. And I’ll only briefly mention the people who feel strongly enough about the issue to make some serious professional changes. If a choreographer can work via remote technology, who can’t?

As Billy Bragg said, “here comes the future and you can’t run from it.” Instead, why not take a little time to practice enhancing your video conferencing image? Be sure you bring an audience-centred approach to your remote talks, just as you would with an in-person presentation, demonstration, or panel. Here are a few ideas to help:

1: Find a good location. Check what’s in the frame. Are there distractions in the background? Take a moment to clear clutter, and to ensure that you’re angled away from windows. You want light shining directly onto your face, not into the camera - make it easy for your audience to see you.

2: Find good placement. Before your talk, raise your computer or camera up so it sits at eye level (when you’re looking straight ahead, chin parallel to the ground). This is a much better angle for your audience to read your expressions and perceive gesture and body language. (Bonus: it’s also more flattering)

3: Find your focus. Remember that you’re speaking through a screen to actual people. While you’re presenting, be conscious of looking down or dropping your eyes to your notes too often. Lift your gaze into the camera so that viewers feel more connected to you and can take in what you’re saying. Give them a chance to benefit from your expertise.

Some people say that remote presentations can never be as good as live ones, that “in-person” is always better than “virtual”. I might question that premise. Maybe it depends on how we define “better”, and what we want it to be “good” for.

But that’s a longer conversation…which, fortunately, we can have on any number of channels.

The Words We Use Still Matter

I’m still pondering this question, and thought I’d re-post this piece:

Recently I listened to an interview with a woman who is a researcher at a respected Canadian university.  The topic was the reporting of terrorist attacks.  Her assertion was that words matter – that the words chosen by reporters can define as well as describe the event, and therefore affect public reaction and political response.

She was an intelligent woman and she made strong points.  But it was her own use of words that struck me.  She frequently used “fillers” -- the umms and uhhhs, those little habitual placeholders we throw in while organizing our thoughts. And by the way, Emma Taylor offers great insights on controlling verbal fillers . You’ll want to read her take on it.

In this particular interview, “y’know” was a biggie, but the one that really got me was “sort of”.  It got me partly because she used it a lot, but more in her particular placement of it.  

Each time she made a strong assertion, she preceded the strongest or most definitive word with “sort of”:

“…an act is terrorism if it, sort of, clearly provokes terror and fear…”

“The, sort of, actual risks…we’ve all seen those charts that show the, sort of, actual statistical probability of dying in a terrorist attack…”

“…in the, sort of, immediate coverage…”

 “The recent shooting was…a typical example of the, sort of, folly of, y’know, hasty and careless reporting…”

How is something done “sort of” clearly?  Can statistics be “sort of” actual ?

I want to be clear: I do not mean to ridicule her or diminish her arguments in any way.  They were rigorous, observant, well constructed and backed up with good evidence.  She was articulate and well educated, clearly an expert in her field.  Yet when she spoke, she undermined her status.  Her “sort of”s served as apologies for her statements.  Ever so subtly – maybe subconsciously – she was ensuring that what she said wouldn’t make her appear too strong, too assertive.
 
Of course men use fillers when they speak as well, but in my experience they generally place them in between thoughts: “So, y’know, the point I’m making is…” and so on.  Once the thought has been formulated in the brain, it’s spoken without being subverted or undermined along the way.

So is this another form of “don’t speak up too much or too often”?  “You don’t want to come across as a strident, opinionated harpy”?  Do we need another hashtag, #TalkLikeAWoman, to go with #DressLikeAWoman?  Because I’m not crazy about #IAmSortOfAStrongConfidentWoman, or #IAmSortOfAnExpertInMyField.  When women own it, as they very much and very often do, I want to hear them own it.  Full stop.

The famous voice teacher Patsy Rodenburg says, “we have to stand by what we say”.  It’s a big thing to do, to commit fully to the words we utter and the ideas carried through them.  It’s not always easy.  But we are living in adventurous times and, as uncomfortable as it is to put ourselves on the line, our lives may get much more uncomfortable if we don’t.

The F Word

The English lexicographer and etymologist Susie Dent was asked online to confirm an old story: that the word “fuck” originated from ancient times when sex was outlawed unless there was explicit consent from the monarch. The decree of “Fornication Under Consent of the King” became “F.U.C.K.”. And thereby hangs a tail.

Dent’s reply: “Sadly, Fornication Under Command/Consent of the King is a much later backronym. The history of fuck is tricksy, but it might be a much-altered version of the Latin ‘pugnare’, to hit or beat - for centuries kestrels were called ‘windfuckers’ because their wings strike the wind.”

I like the Latin origin story way more than the backronym. Kestrels are such romantic, medieval birds to me, and the idea of calling them windfuckers cracks me up. But Dent seemed to sense that her answer might disappoint some of her readers. Acronyms are fun, and “F.U.C.K.” is especially tempting. Because it’s funny to imagine people in Olde Englande going to some crown-wearer to ask for permission to have sex? Or because it’s appealing to think of people resorting to this simple codeword, this quickie, instead of a lengthy royal dictate?

Acronyms are visual engagements with language. They can be fun like codewords are fun. But “fuck” is more likely an old word expressing a physical action or movement whose sound has changed as pronunciations shift and slide around. The engagement is kinesthetic. It is aural; tactile; visceral. We express it in moments of heightened emotion, and research suggests that our impulse to do so comes from the same part of the brain that releases endorphins. Schitt’s Creek’s Moira Rose, after struggling too many times to articulate the name “Herb Ertlinger”, finally bursts out with “BINGO LINGFUCKER!” and we feel her satisfaction. Many, many articles have been written about what happens in the brain when we say the word; or about how saying the word makes us smarter, funnier, better dressed - who knows. But EXPRESSING it, not looking at it.

From the friction of the ‘fff’, to the open vowel, through to that explosive ‘k’. It’s all there. No decoder ring required.

Cold Read, Warm Heart

Reading aloud with Ian Raffel & Gerry Trentham at Canada’s National Voice Intensive, U.B.C., 2009 (photo credit: Marcus Wu)

When I was growing up, my family used to have a holiday tradition of a reading of Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’. At some point in the afternoon on Christmas Day, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins would arrive, and, as my father cooked the Christmas feast, we would gather in the living room with copies of the story, all taking parts and reading it aloud. My father liked taking the role of Marley’s ghost, especially when he discovered he could enhance his performance by bashing cooking utensils and pots for sound effects. “I WEAR THE CHAIN I FORGED IN LIFE!!!” he shrieked from the kitchen, nearly giving my grandfather a heart-attack.

At the time, I just saw it as part of our weird English family’s old-fashioned ways - like the carols we always sang together while my mother accompanied us on the old upright piano.

But those readings have done more for my career than I knew or appreciated at the time. Any actor worth their training knows the value of good cold-reading skills for tv, film, or theatre auditions. And they are essential for voice-over work. When you get called to the studio for a voice-over audition, you may or may not get the script or copy in advance. Mostly you just show up, head into the booth, and fire away. In these situations, you’ll make faster friends with the engineer and director if you don’t waste time stumbling through long passages or struggling to grasp the sense of a phrase.

As a coach, I advise actors to develop this skill by, you guessed it, practicing. The simple and obvious truth is that if you read aloud every day, you get better at reading anything aloud. It doesn’t have to be painful, you don’t have to make it a race – like the novelist Donna Tartt says, “if you’re not enjoying something, it’s almost always because you’re doing it too fast.” And let’s not get mired in questions about talent or artistry. As the plié is to the mover, so reading aloud is to the speaker. It’s your barre work. Read Charles Dickens, read Toni Morrison, read Marie Clements, read any writing you love…just read good words and speak them out loud.

Do it every day, so that it becomes as natural as breathing.

The Gravity of Your Words

When I’m studying Shakespeare text, I try to start from a neutral place, as much as possible. This is a challenge, given how loaded words are. I am far from objective, and words are evocative. But I do my best to step back and look at the words on their own terms before making big decisions about them.

In his excellent book ‘Shakespeare On Toast’, Ben Crystal talks about what he calls the “false friends” – words Shakespeare used in the 1600s and which are still used today, only the meaning has changed. And the change, I’ve noticed, is often a negative one. There is a downward pressure on language, as if the words, like humans, are giving in to gravity. A downward pull to an adverse place.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘rhetoric’ as the art of using language to persuade. But today, that word is mostly used to describe empty, meaningless talk meant to confuse, obfuscate, or deceive. How did it go from being a valuable skill set to simply a fancy word for ‘lies’?

Or, take a word like ‘doom’. It pops up often in Shakespeare’s plays. Romeo asks the Friar, “what is the Prince’s doom?” Cleopatra says she will kneel “Till from his all-obeying breath I hear / The doom of Egypt.”

One’s doom was one’s fate. It could also mean a decree, judgement or decision. Yes, some of the Shakespearean examples turned out to be pretty serious, but that wasn’t necessarily built into the word itself.

In current times, we don’t separate the gloom from ‘doom’. We say the failed relationship “was doomed from the start”, or “that spells doom” when things look really dire. The word is now synonymous with disaster.

Changed meanings can be subtle yet powerful. The word ‘sad’ used to simply mean ‘serious’ or ‘solemn’. Two people “in sad conference” were just people having a serious talk. No weeping required.

The small, seemingly innocuous words are especially fascinating to me. ‘Should’ is an auxiliary or helper word for verbs, and not nearly so important as the verbs themselves. It’s doing its job in a statement like “I should like to meet her” – it’s about liking and meeting (and her, probably). In the Taming of the Shrew, when Kate says she is “as heavy as my weight should be,” Petruchio picks up on that ‘be’ and responds with “should bee? Should buzz.” It’s the “be” part that makes a pun.

But modern actors often emphasize “should”s in their texts, adding a sense of obligation or of being compelled. That might be appropriate in, “I SHOULD do my homework though I’d rather play outside,” but in many other instances, it colours the thought with a feeling of being constrained or doing something against one’s will. And that’s a downer that Shakespeare’s characters might not need.   

In a world of inflation (economic, academic, ego), we respond with linguistic deflation. When ‘amazing’ has become a synonym for ‘good’, and ‘awesome’ is really just ‘fine’, does joy have any meaning? Words are products of their time, and a robust language like English is constantly changing – that’s good. Through the centuries, meanings can start to slide around a little – that’s natural. But what does this hopeless slide say about us?

May we never lose our ability to feel the raw power of words. As James Hillman says in ‘Culture and the Animal Soul’:

“By means of speech we enact what animals do in

behaviour. With speech we warn, claim territory, challenge

and destroy. With speech we court and seduce a mate, and

by means of speech we instruct our offspring and organize

our group disciplines... Like tigers losing their stripes, like

beached whales and blind eagles are we without our

rhetoric.. “

Written in the Body

When I was completing my master’s degree, my advisor told me that her wish for me going forward was “that you spend time every day just being in your body.” She had noticed my habit of intellectualizing voice work. I believe this can be a strength for a coach: investigating the structure of languages and researching the meanings of words. I value the clear articulation of complex thoughts through the spoken word.

But the human voice is bodily process, a physical action. I do now spend time every day being in my body, and I seek new ways of developing and honouring this physical side of voice and text work.

Recently, I had an opportunity to work with Deaf artists on Shakespeare text. This extraordinary group of performers challenged my traditional approaches to text work, executing exercises in ways that were completely different from what I’d experienced before, adding new meaning and resonance to the texts. As I perceived through interpreters, the signed languages were communicating something far beyond a literal meaning. And this turned my phonocentric exercises - used by hearing actors to uncover layers of deeper meanings - into something of a game of catch-up.

My sense is that ASL expresses, through the body, not only poetic structures, grammar, and images, but even metaphor, temporal aspects, or emotional states. Of course this is particularly exciting in Shakespeare performance, which is always a process of interpretation – there is no objective ‘Hamlet’.

For me, it’s also a fitting reminder that words and ideas don’t reside solely in the brain. I have often thought of words being physical: muscular and filled with kinetic energy. But it’s also true that our bodies are linguistic. Now I find myself circling back to hear my mentor’s voice, “be in your body”. So maybe that’s my homework: investigating the structure and meaning and signs in the language of the body.

Organs

Summertime in Vancouver means Playland. My job in this campaign is always the straight man gig, but it's an honour to speak alongside these great artists. Rethink knocks it out of the park again this year...even the cranky announcer sounds happy...!

Happy Hallowe'en

I love that time at the start of summer when the Playland campaign swings around.  But when autumn arrives, their Fright Night ads are an opportunity for ReThink to get a little creepy.  This year we’re riffing on the classics.  Heeeeeeerrrre’s Johnny…..

Summer is Over But I Still Can't Stop The Feeling...

The Kid informs me, with an epic eye roll, that I should have tired of Justin Timberlake’s ‘Can’t Stop the Feeling!’ months ago.  It's true, this ain't usually my kind of music.  But thanks to a funny and insightful podcast called 'Switched on Pop', I now understand why I’m still going electric wavy over this pop tune...text painting!  A synesthete's dream, text painting makes me think of Shakespeare -- how sounds and rhythms often reflect or underscore the literal meaning of characters' words.

Pick it up at the 15 minute mark for the specs on how exactly JT text paints this song, or listen to the full podcast for the broader discussion.  Plus, MC Hammer and Elvis Costello too:

http://www.switchedonpop.com/38-justin-timberlake-goes-medieval/

The Gap of Time

Okay look, I know there has been an onslaught of Shakespeare Anything "because 400th", but the Hogarth Shakespeare Project is actually a great thing.  A bunch of award-winning authors are writing novels based on Shakespeare plays.  Like peanut butter and chocolate, put two great things together and there's just no downside. 

Jeanette Winterson's novel is called 'The Gap of Time', based on 'The Winter's Tale'.  I have my own reasons for wanting to read this particular story at this particular time.  But I'm compelled to tell everyone I know to read it too, whether or not you ever intend to see a production of this play again. 

Winterson's modern take will crack this old fairy tale open like crazy for you.  In London's financial district: a digital camera lens into Leontes' insane and terrifying jealousy.  In Louisiana: piano bars, car repairs, and families.  The confusing and complex nature of love. 

And in the end, the possibility that what is lost can, in fact, be found.