Today, I thought I’d do this vlog outside because it’s nice out! Anyways, I just finished up today’s rehearsal. Yesterday and today was great, particularly on my voice with a dialect coach. I learned how to use my stage voice. Clearly, it’s different than how we use it when chatting with people. What I learned was my tongue placement in my mouth. I learned how I should set my tongue. My enunciation habits were mostly from lipreading and that was when I developed my speech habits. I had the habit of placing my tongues out of my mouth. For example, when I pronounce words with “L”, I’d place my tongue out onto my teeth. Or when I pronounce words with “th”, I’d place my tongue onto my lip. So, I basically have to unlearn and retrain my tongue muscles to make sure I enunciate the words correctly, maybe with a proper accent.
Also, I’ve learned that my voice muscles need to remain relaxed when using my voice. It’s like golf. When swinging a golf club, our whole body’s muscles need to be relaxed to hit a long drive to make the ball go as far and as straight as possible. If we force the club to hit the ball, then the ball won’t take off well. Similar principle with our voices. If I don’t relax my voice muscles, then my voice may sound forced or unnatural. Whatever that is. So, I’ll need to work on a few things words with X, words ending “ks” and “dg”. For those of you who know linguistics something with pronunciations or IPA or whatever that is. I’m sure those of you reading this who have some linguistics background or voicing will understand what I’m talking about.
I learned a lot of these through our dialect coach yesterday all in just two hours. It was a lot to consume but I did what I had to do to make this work with the cast. It gave me ideas on how I’d be able to use this type of coaching for actors and actresses using sign language on stage. It was beneficial for me.
I’m feeling more and more confident using my speaking voice for the play. I’m okay speaking with my family and friends but in front of the audience. Yikes. [gulps] For the people plan to watch our play that are not familiar with my “deaf voice”, I’ll have to make my voice as clear as I can for them. I’m sure this won’t mean my “deaf voice” will be removed. I just have to make sure I enunciate clear. There will be lines I still struggle but I’ll continue to work on them. I’ve been Deaf my whole life and my speech won’t be drastically better and be as equivalent as hearing people. I mean I just learned to recognize my voice just yesterday. Since I learned these, it helped when the cast provided notes on my scripts to be sure I read and say them clearly on top of memorizing my visual cues and lines.
Overall, my first week of rehearsal. I think I made it through with the cast and all of us together! I feel great and accomplished with everyone! We got this everyone!
See you all again soon!