Emphasise

The Word of Wisdom this week is: emphasise. There are many ways of making a word or phrase stand out. The most obvious one is to speak it more loudly, but you can also make something stand out by saying it more quietly. You can go up in pitch, or down. You can speed up or, more likely, slow down. You can change the rhythm of your speech, or add repetition, or change your tone of voice or accent. Very effectively, you can put a little … brief pause of a fraction of a second … before a word or phrase you want to have a particular impact.

Become aware of these factors in other people’s speech and, in a subtle way, gradually work them into your own. They will enrich what you have to say.

Project

And that brief Word of Wisdom? It’s ‘Project.’ Meaning speak loudly and emphatically enough to reach your audience and also use gesture and facial expressions strongly enough to do the same thing. It’s mainly a requirement of stage acting, where you do not have a microphone and the back row of the audience may be a long way away. A loud enough voice is produced by breathing deeply, using the diaphragm, and not by forcing it in the throat. That’s why you should do all those breathing and voice exercises. Projection becomes difficult when you are playing an intimate scene, close to another actor. We automatically drop our voices when we are speaking to someone close to us and to overcome this tendency, you have to remember that although your character is speaking to the other character, as an actor you also need to be heard by the audience, so you have to keep that in mind too. Unnatural but necessary. Project.