Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:56:37 -0800
To: puptcrit-AT-puptcrit.org
From: The Independent Eye <eye-AT-independenteye.org>
Subject: Re: [Puptcrit] voices


	Thoughts on an older thread.

>She suggests going half way between your own voice and the character voice
>you imagine.   My own experience when I read to my kids was that they
>were very irritated when I got into "voices" for each character or the
>narrator.  I know that reading to kids and putting on a puppet show
>are two different things, but voices can definitely go too far.

	Character voices have the same challenge as stage dialects. 
It's not so much a matter of how fully "into" it you are as how fluid 
it is.  An Irishman speaking isn't thinking about doing an Irish 
dialect: he's just speaking with the nuance and variety of a real 
person, since that's what he is.  But the actor "doing" a dialect has 
to find his way through to as natural and fully nuanced a voice as 
the real guy.  Otherwise we hear him "doing" it.  Same thing's true 
for puppet bears or elves or pigs or bloodsucking vampires: whether 
we're kids or adults, we have very sophisticated bullshit detectors 
for sensing someone faking it.

  	When dialects or strange voices are required, I've found much 
success in having the actors use those voices throughout the 
rehearsal: on breaks, in discussions with the director, all the time. 
It feels very silly, but it works.  The director reciprocates: talk 
to the bear as a bear, to the hillbilly as a hillbilly.  Point is to 
get fully into the mind and the music of the voice, rather than 
simply indicating on every line, "I'm trying to sound like the Big 
Bad Wolf."  That gets old fast.

Cheers-
Conrad B.
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