Trust

The Mirror Cracked from Side to Side!

I meet many voices in my line of work. Tired ones, timid ones, exuberant ones. Voices that inflect upwards, pitch downwards and drive through. Every voice makes me so incredibly excited at the prospect of new possibilities, new explorations and new revelations.

Sometimes a voice makes me incredibly sad. It’s never the quality of the voice that does this - we all come to this work at different levels. 

This sadness comes from witnessing a speaker’s relationship with his voice.

The voice is a great revealer.

It is the first thing to indicate sickness, tension, excitement, background, confidence....the list could go on.......

It is also one of the first things we lose faith in.

How many times have I heard “I hate the sound of my voice”?

How many times have I heard “(Insert lecturer’s/director’s name here) says my voice should be more like (insert famous actor’s name here)”?

And where does this start?......:

How many times have I heard a mother say to a child

- Just sit there and be quiet. Shoosh!!?

I want to shout

-Lady! You’re undermining that child’s ability to connect with his voice

She'd think I was mad. I probably am.

Instead I turn to my daughter (Miss Pronunciation) and loudly request her to order her babycino in her best Dory-speaking-whale voice, sing with me as we walk down the supermarket aisle, or do Sarah Wilmot’s famous Snitchy Ladies voice exercise. I’m not having any of that silly quiet business. If I wanted quiet I wouldn’t have had a child.

That shooshy mother comes in a variety of forms causing us to doubt our voices: the poorly designed costumes that are so tight that the body loses trust in how we breathe; voices that are under-trained and overused so one cannot trust the little power they did have; actors that are so unused to being allowed to experiment with their voicesunder poor direction that they lose trust in their ability to vocally play......

Now I’m not one to oft quote pop-culture but Lady Gaga once said “Trust is like a mirror, you can fix it if it's broken, but you can still see the crack in that mother fucker's reflection.”

Lady Gaga - you might be on crazy gal, but you’re right: that crack takes an awful lot of sealing/healing. Laying yourself bare to the truth in front of an audience is an awfully difficult thing to do if there is a fracture in your vocal trust.