The right to speak patsy rodenburg pdf

This bestselling book by one of the world's foremost voice and acting coaches is a classic in its field. Practical, passionate and inspiring, it teaches how to use the voice fully and expressively, without fear and in any situation. Patsy Rodenburg has trained thousands of actors, singers, lawyers, politicians business people, teachers and students: her book distills that knowledge and experience so that everyone can enjoy the right to speak.

This second edition contains new revisions and additional content taking into account the effect of social media on communication skills, the need for empathetic listening, how scientific discovery now illuminates why and how voice exercises work and cultural and global issues of ethics and storytelling.

This book first debunks some myths surrounding vocal work, and gives some excellent insight into how the voice can be restrained by all manner of habits that develop throughout a lifetime. The advice is straight forward and has a reasonable amount of evidence through experience to support what is said.

The aim of the first section seems to be to advocate the release of a natural voice- one free from harmful habits formed through posture, upbringing and more that obstruct its potential. Rodenburg also breaks down habits specific to men and women, which I also found to be insightful. The second part of the book contains some techniques on how you can centre your body, relax and develop your voice.

The main aim seems to be to release tension and then to progress from there. I like this book, and I recommend it. The advice might seem straightforward and unconventional when you place it against traditional vocal teachers, but the book has a combination of evidence and an emphasis on what comes natural to make it a very enjoyable and relaxing read. Karishma Raghunath. Rodenburg expresses natural voice and habitual voice as well as focusing on the causes that influences our voices.

Of which we release without pretence, training or force. The natural voice is the way we sound when we are born. The habitual voice is the voice that becomes changed or restricted. This happens due to several habits that we incur throughout our day in our daily lives that forces us to change the way our voice sound.. By frequently allowing the habitual voice to take over, we gradually lose touch with our Natural Voice. Inevitably the voice loses its flexibility and we become conformed by our habits.

Thus allowing the habit to control the way you speak. However the natural voice is still within, even though it may be forgotten However when pain, loss, betrayal, love, joy or delight becomes so great to the point of bursting, we always break through to a heightened plateau of communication. Suddenly we need a voice, we need a word and we find both.

We make contact. We can even surprise ourselves by our eloquence. Often, too, we find ourselves speaking a language we never usually experience. We leave the prosaic behind and will often become poetic. Speakers at weddings and funerals always captivate us in this way. None are usually professional speakers. The moment, however, imbues their voice with a compelling motive to be heard. In these heightened moments, I will argue, people are at their most vocally clear and released.

They are also at their most natural because they are most themselves. Those expressive sounds that signal an instant reaction to life and often result from pure heightened spontaneity.

I would also suggest that the great classical plays of all cultures that confront the universal issues of humankind are all exploring heightened moments. We have only to look at the plays of die Greeks to find example after example. Shakespeare's writing could be described as life with all the boring bits cut out of it but all the thrilling bits left i n. He might give us thirty seconds of normality in a character's life before plunging them and us into the terrible tests he imposes on them.

Bearing this in mind it does seem stupid when actors try to impose their disconnected everyday reality and unfocused speech habits onto these heightened texts and then claim it is 'real' to mumble their way through K i n g L e a r. The heightened need to speak gives us the heightened right to speak. One without the other leaves the whole enterprise sorely out of joint. Natural Release We have to learn to release sound naturally in order to release ourselves.

Then all that energy will flow into a word, a sentence and a need to reach out to the world, purely through a combination of sound and language. I often speak about drunkenness when I do voice work. Many people experience a free vocal position when their social and behavioural barriers have been dulled by drink. They are also most physically relaxed.

Suddenly someone who wouldn't dare sing sober, releases their voice completely as they become intoxicated.

I am not advocating drink or alcoholism as an aid in vocal performance but the 'memory'. In the West we Uve in such vocally and orally suppressed societies that the sudden experience of vocal freedom can severely shock anyone trying it out for the first time.

By touching off our vocal power we begin to sense all sorts of other powers. Our society simply does not encourage us to be vocally free or expressive. You have to go to other areas of the world like the Mediterranean, Africa, the Orient or the Caribbean to experience genuine vocal freedom in action.

Such a riot of sounds will often josde most Westeners. Many of us have been taught not to feel easy about expressing words and sounds openly. Our society likes to control the volume and keep us vocal hostages; it doesn't want to hear the thoughts and opinions of certain groups like children, women and minorities.

Too often we only like to hear the voices of so-called 'first class citizens', well-bred and well-toned. Ironically, it is usually the 'other' classes of citizens whose voices still retain the habits of natural release. The natural voice is lost to too many of us as different factors, oppressions and influences - often of the most mundane sorts, like conformity - erode our self-confidence.

We first learn to shut down and then begin to shut up. Some of these factors are profound, others are banal. From class to fashion, environment, family, religion, peer pressure, sexual dilemmas, our work places, the state of our bodies, geography, dentistry, physical injury. I will explore the purely physical factors later on. Suffice it to say that all of these pernicious influences, plus the ones I have yet to name, chip away at our natural voice and obstruct it with habits.

It is very useful to understand some of the ultimate causes of any debilitating or even mildly irritating habit, but often just releasing the physical tension that has found its way into the voice by whatever means will be sufficient. Perhaps we should not always have to talk about the source, but just. Just relaxing and taking your time, for instance, or just saying one word at a time are wonderful ways to start experiencing the right to speak.

Many voice teachers agree that our habits, the ones that directly affect the voice, take hold of us between the age of eight and our early teens. I don't have a hard and fast opinion about this because I have seen habits begin to influence the adult voice where there were none before or completely new habits appear.

Divorce or the loss of a job, for instance, or the set-back in one's career that ignites a mid-life crisis can all lead to habits that suddenly smother the voice or compress speech. A blow to our self-esteem or just an embarrassing moment can equally do the trick.

Or it can happen at an age far earlier than eight. Some years ago I was working with a group of doctors. We were discussing the natural cry of a baby. After the session one doctor showed me some of the infants in his care.

Following him I found myself entering a ward full of battered children. Already thencries were erratic and strained; strangulated, actually. Their experience of violence had already pierced their voices and created habits. W o u l d they, I wondered, ever have the right to speak again? Holding On to Habits The one thing you can say about habits is that they are comforting.

Y o u grow to like them and they grow to like you. People generally hold on to habits for their familiarity and security. Human beings are creatures of habit; we all know that cliche and retain habits that become part of ourselves to prove it. Sometimes we hold on to habits for good reasons, other times because of fears, misconceptions or simply because a habit has become so habit-forming that we no longer notice it.

Naturally we all have a right to our habits, our personal. But if we have cultivated one, I only hope it is out of choice and not for a more negative reason. Habits, after all, can be addictive and even unhealthy. Breaking habits can sometimes be alarming because you can suddenly feel empty or naked without them.

A habit might seem so important to us, so much a personal trait, so very interesting and expressive, that we have invested a great chunk of our personality in it. Vocal habits are of this sort. A particular delivery, tone, speech impediment or affected accent draws attention to us, gets us noticed. Sometimes we exaggerate habits like these in times of stress. Without them we think we would be dreadfully dull and, at worst, very middle class. So we might, for instance, speak with weak 'r's as in 'wabbit', or babble in a pseudo-excited delivery as in disc jockey speak, or settle into the quiet confidential tones of 'the comforting voice'.

Each is a habit. We are so often under the misapprehension that vocal habits add colour to our speech and zest to our personalities.

Generally the opposite is truer: a habit drains our speech of colour and usually sets us further adrift from our real selves and voices. Many popular performers and public figures have made both a living and a legend from their vocal peculiarities. On the screen, television or radio this kind of put-on vocal habit works incredibly well.

But it will neither carry nor be clear from the Olivier stage of Britain's National Theatre. Voice and speech habits work best in closeup. They are used to supreme advantage when they create a very tight circle of sound around the speaker, particularly when used in conjunction with a repetitive physical action or in combination with other habits. This is why they serve comedians so well.

Habits used with choice can make some performers seem like weird and wonderful mechanical dolls. Those kinds of habits are priceless ones that are consciously cultivated. I have had actors and people with thick regional accents pace around me as though they were in a gladiatorial arena and I was a lion ready to pounce on a lucrative habit.

Among students and younger actors a favourite habit nowadays is the voice that affects 'street credibility', a kind of 'hey man, you know what I mean' honesty. If you take that kind of habit away from them or they are suddenly left without it they feel vocally naked. They are back to themselves. But what I am usually offering in its place is an altogether better choice, I think.

The right to speak in your own personal voice, uncoloured and unfavoured by anything artificial. Both kinds of speakers, those with either good or restrictive habits, labour under the same fear - that they might lose something special that is very much a part of them.

No habit will disappear for good unless you actively will its disappearance. Really w i l l it out of yourself. Voice teachers, whatever any of us may claim or proclaim, are not wizards. If you like a habit, feel that it gives you aura and power, by all means keep it. But recognise it for what it is. Keep it with the knowledge that under certain circumstances it will be wholly inappropriate for clear and telling communication.

Affectations always get in the way of honesty and clarity. It is what makes 'beautiful voices' sound to me like ineffectual or so-called 'bad voices'. Y o u can't be clear in the large padded auditoriums any modern theatre or lecture hall designed with soft materials and wall coverings if you do not use your voice openly and fully. A borrowed voice won't help here, a voice that trails off at the end of words or sentences will only lead to a dead end.

A forceful vocal push will shatter an audience's ears if used over a microphone or transmitted by radio. A clamped voice will surely suffer damage if forced to speak in large spaces night after night. A heavily glottal or 'attacking' sound tires very easily from this affliction. Habits have a way of destroying voices - and sometimes professional careers. Is this a risky habit you like well enough to keep?

Habits Linked to Fear and Sexuality Some habits that make us hold back on our voices are connected to human fear and sexuality. These habits are more complex and harder for a voice teacher to pinpoint and eradicate easily. Often they can never be eliminated completely. So many of us hunch in telling ways shoulders up, breasts and genitals protected to insulate ourselves physically from others.

If it is too frightening to let go physically then don't. Y o u will do so when you are ready. Generally when you are feeling quite pleased and open you do it without noticing. The so-called sexual revolution of the s and s followed by the sexual confusion and suppression of the s and s have brought with them their habitual hang-ups that have left telling effects on the voice.

Students - both male and female - are ashamed or uncertain of clinging to their virginity and are expected to have lost it by a certain point. I have actually heard some voice teachers in Britain and America exhort their students to 'go and lose their virginity'.

But this is where voice work naturally leads into delicate personal areas where it is subject to abuse. One ought not to venture in the direction of deep breathing and the deep feelings it taps until fully committed and prepared.

I know of many people who, once they have released the sheer power of their full breath and voice, frighten themselves by their new found strength. A full voice can do that to you only because. But finding it too soon can confuse and shock you. I raise these issues here and will raise them again later on for the sole reason that finding your voice is sometimes a frightening process.

We all have the right to find i t , I believe, but have to do so at our own pace and in our own good time. This is not work you can force. Our genuine voice, the one that is habit-free and guilt-free, may have been locked away and hidden for years, deeply tangled and enmeshed in a web of habits.

Drawing it out has to be a gradual, deliberate and delicate process that we take one step at a time. The fear of butting up against forces that block it will diminish over time as you play and experiment with your voice during the discovery process. The caution you should carry through this process is that up to the moment when you fully experience and then accept your voice, you should hold on to certain habits as a kind of tightly woven safety net.

Sometimes you have taken habits on for protection, so do recognise that fact and use them to catch you should you fall. But habits, like crutches, can be cast aside once the body is fit to stand again on its own without any artificial supports. The same is true for the voice. Habits that Manipulate and Control A whole host of the vocal habits we acquire are not just used to defend us but to manipulate and control others.

Sometimes our reluctance to address them has to do with an unwillingness to surrender power. I am not just speaking here about the overbearing, aggressive speaker. To be brutally honest for a moment, a heavy stammerer might have learned to enjoy making people pay attention, making us listen and wait for the word to burst forth.

This is neither true of stammerers in general nor do I say this to slight those with this speech affliction. But I use this as an example of manipulation because so many stammerers have admitted to me that this is part of.

The listener is left dangling, hanging on to the expectation of a completed word or phrase, and in the process the stammerer can gain time to fill out a thought.

This only works, though, with sensitive listeners. A more frequent habit in this category is that of the 'devoicer' or whisperer; someone who speaks so low and confidentially that we must literally lean in to hear what they have to say.

This kind of manipulation is used by 'guru'-like figures or anyone who has created an aura of power and control by simply speaking softly. This may sound contradictory, manipulating and controlling by speaking softly, but it is true. We have to go to the devoicer to decipher what is said. By speaking softly the speaker has figuratively made us bow at his or her feet in order to receive the word. A precious attitude perhaps, but an awfully effective one.

Quiet people use this habit to wonderful advantage. A n d I have encountered this habit interestingly enough in people whose job it is to exert control: theatre directors, upper echelon business executives and leading politicians. I suppose it can be called 'the speak softly and carry a big stick' syndrome.

Quiet, steady, hypnotic speech can often signal either confidence or deep sincerity. It rarely signals danger or competitiveness. Lots of very powerful women, I have noticed, use this technique to entrance their listeners and not to frighten men.

We all become devoicers when stopped by a traffic policeman or when caught in the act. I usually think that devoicing as a manipulation starts in childhood and never outgrows some of us. The 'waffler' is another in this category of vocal manipulators. He or she is the kind of speaker who abandons clear speech and succinct, definite language in favour of an incoherent delivery and wandering thoughts that ramble through our minds.

This is the sort of speaker who habitually delights in obfuscation and obscurity. If the language sounds learned, profound and embellished and the points being made appear to have growth potential, the listener is then left with the. Often, however, we are simply being vocally and verbally duped. The waffler takes us on a verbal wild goose chase in search of sense and meaning. This is a very useful habit that we all adopt, especially when we try to waffle and avoid answering direct questions, avoid unpleasantnesses or just refuse to speak the truth.

We all waffle, don't we? But the next time you do, try and notice the speech and voice habits you adopt in order to do it. We put up a whole blind of sound, posturing and rambling ideas and phrases. In my experience this is the kind of habit cultivated by public officials, so-called experts on various issues, theatre directors unsure of an answer and doctors trying to avoid telling patients the whole truth.

Wafflers are often delightfully gnomic and envelop us in linguistic bear hugs which we are then left to straighten up from on our own. At first glance the 'hesitator' seems more a victim than a manipulator. He or she leaves us waiting for a reply. In fact, the reaction from a hesitator is often a delayed one, like the reaction we sometimes get over intercontinental telephone lines!

The rhythm and pace of normal conversations are not part of the hesitator's brief. He or she doesn't lead the listener like a well-rehearsed speech partner should, but holds us back or steps on our toes in a hesitant, stabbing search for the right word, phrase or answer.

The organic stream of natural discourse seems continually dammed up into little stagnant pools where we wait for the conversational flow to be released again. This habit works as a form of manipulation if the listener is kind or gullible or even subservient.

The speaker may be a powerful one, practised in the use of hesitation as a means of keeping a roomful of listeners in thrall. A hesitator can often steer a conversation in a manner that a clear, fluent speaker never could. A whole room can wait for a reply from a hesitator. There are lots of speech teachers who advise speakers - businessmen particularly - to rely on hesitation techniques as a sure means to gaining a captive audience.

What we are made. But when hesitation becomes such an afflicting habit that we cannot even give an answer to whether we would like tea or coffee, then I think the hesitator has ventured into a habitual danger zone from which he or she ought to retreat. We usually excuse the hesitator or other types of non-communicators as being shy or reserved. Many, in fact, are severely blocked and inhibited speakers or need to face the fact that help is required.

I know a couple, both flamboyant conversationalists and wonderful hosts, who continually entertained a female guest for whole evenings and days at a time.

She would sit in the midst of our group and contribute nothing or very litde to our involved conversations. She just sat, watched and listened. Discussions, debates and verbal passions whizzed around her head and we all thought this must have made her too dizzy to talk. I began to resent the fact that this woman was taking in so much experience and not giving back one word in return. Here we were revealing ourselves, speaking freely on all sorts of levels, and there she sat behind a wall of silence.

So shy, so hesitant, we thought. We were all silenced some years later when we appeared - our dialogue quoted and our stories revealed - in her stage plays. We had accepted her hesitation to join in our discussions but were duped in the end. A l l of these common habits adopted by some speakers - the reluctant speaker who stammers, the devoicer who whispers, the waffler who overelaborates, the hesitator who dams and clams up - are both weaknesses and sources of power.

A speaker will never give up one of these habits either willingly or easily if it is serving him or her favourably. But here is the problem: there will certainly come a time when each of us needs to reach out vocally and verbally, when we will need to take the right to speak but suddenly find ourselves helpless to do so.

The sore point about these kinds of habits is that they atrophy our vocal range and equipment. A voice that. The waffler cannot be simple and direct. The hesitator only taps a fragment of the full capacity to speak.

The devoicer can be deadened into silence. When we surrender to habits we surrender many of our vocal rights too. I often wonder if our society actually likes to hear children? A And And At child speak behave should when always he's he say spoken at is able. Robert Louis Stevenson We see parents in supermarkets constandy shaking and 'shushing' their children in the most threatening manner.

When we do allow children to speak we discipline them to say only what is polite and unthreatening. Yes, I do think we are told too often to be quiet on the one hand and only say what is nice on the other.

Think of the habits those two directives engender! It seems to me that as a society we violate the child's right to speak and enjoy sounds. Obviously there are many families who engender a right to speak from the very start. They encourage an imaginative exploration of verbal dexterity, a feel for words, debate and discussion at the dinner table and a choice to speak one's own mind. Even if you are just five. Yet the experiences I. People have been disciplined from the earliest age not to speak and certainly not to make noise.

To be 'mannerly', yes, but in the process to become too mannered. A well cared for baby, nurtured and encouraged, makes the most extraordinary range of 'mewling and puking' sounds. Babies have a free, tireless stream of vocal energy always at their command. The hard part is keeping them quiet. New mothers and fathers can certainly tell you that. They are in fact eager to speak and become suppressed only through conditioning. To our adult ears the sounds a baby makes may not always sound attractive but they certainly are natural and open ones.

Just listen, for instance, to the variety of notes a baby can intone. The sheer experimentation in harmonising or distorting sounds in the resonating organs - head, mouth, nose, throat, chest - and in the articulating organs of the mouth, tongue and throat muscles that will prepare them for later speech, all this and the sheer volume they can achieve in cries and shrieks leaves a voice teacher like me astonished.

A n d to think that all this is done with only 3mm length of vocal cords makes you stop and ponder: a how it is possible and b why do we surrender that capacity as we 'mature'? Do we not, in fact, seem to 'immature' vocally as we grow away from infancy? What goes wrong? As a child develops, first vocal and later speech restrictions are levied on them by parents and teachers.

We are first told to hush and then told what not to say. I can remember at a very early stage sitting in the back seat of a car with my friend's father driving, making those childish nonsense sounds that invariably led to words: 'auck, buck, cuck, duck, euck, f ' Suddenly, almost as if from out of nowhere, the back of a hand struck my mouth and I heard an enraged ' D o n ' t you ever speak or make that sound again! The point is that all sorts of pressures, well intentioned discipline and even a benign finger up to the hps limit a child's access to his or her own voice and the capacity and right to speak.

Obviously as the baby tunes up, babbles and toys with first one sound and then another - almost duplicating a series of vocal exercises like the kind I'll be offering in Part Two - certain expressions are encouraged or discouraged depending on the parents' language and culture. T r y , for instance, getting a group of younger or older adults to: blow a raspberry; move their facial muscles in ways that resemble funny faces; or play with non-intellectual sounds like ia la la' or any number of tongue twisters.

They all collapse in laughter or embarrassment at any of these commands. Probably in course of experimentation the baby stumbles on the sounds 'da da' or 'ma ma' and the baby is encouraged to cease experimenting but focus energy instead on 'daddy' and 'mummy'.

We learn rather swiftly to stop pleasing ourselves and please others with the sounds we make. I am certainly not trying to make any deep and original discoveries here on the level of child psychologists like a Piaget or Bernstein. But I do want to make you aware of how our own voice and speech begin to get manipulated from a very early age. For the sake of education, a necessary step, a large bit of our vocal potential also becomes sorely limited.

We remember the slap across the face, the mouth washed out with soap, the repetitive focus on 'daddy' and 'mummy' to the exclusion of other sounds. Our sounds are focused to gratify and impress others rather than ourselves.

A powerful instrument full of sound and capacity is suddenly curtailed by limits of one kind or another; fertile ground for habits to develop. A baby on waking will gently warm up and play with its voice before getting down to the real business of the day and calling out to the world.

How many of us, as adults. H o w many of us would rather go through the early part of the day in total silence, not uttering a word to anyone? At night many babies and young children will wind down the day's activities by chatting through the day's events. Every day to a child is another vocal excursion into novel and exciting terrain.

They speak in order to know the world, to identify i t , to give it names. The exploration is unabashed and honest in its directness. I'm not suggesting that we should maintain our childlike wonder into adulthood, but even simple childlike activity like warming up the voice is essential to any professional voice user as is the adventure with words.

A l l of us, especially those of us who use our voices professionally, simply cannot afford to abandon the right to explore the vocal potential of linking words to the experience or object they express.

We need to speak, and come by our birthright to speaking, by sounding words aloud, breathing them into the air, so that we understand their significance and the very actions and emotions the words describe.

A child seizes ownership of a word by sounding it infinitely until its tones and proportions, the thing itself, is clear. Spoken language sometimes I think more than written or read language makes experience, ideas and emotions concrete and tangible.

When Hamlet speaks his great soliloquy that starts To be or not to be', he gives voice to his dilemma just like a child in a series of sounds that first coordinate and then negate each other. Look at any other great Shakespearean speech or scene and you find characters using language literally to voice out loud experiences escaping and taking shapes in sounds. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover.

Error rating book. File Name: the right to speak patsy rodenburg pdf. Patsy Rodenburg on the Power of Presence. The Right to Speak - Patsy Rodenburg. There is no teacher, in my experience, who brings all these together with such wisdom and patience.