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Speech stereotypes: good vs. evil

At 8:30 on the morning of Tuesday, August 7 2012, five dialect coaches found themselves facing (via Skype, in one case) an audience of voice and speech teachers. We were there to discuss speech stereotypes in performance work. To be honest, until the conference started, I wasn’t sure that anyone other than the panelists would show up. Maybe it was too early in the day. Maybe people would fear that they’d be in for an hour of heated argument on a divisive subject—hardly the happiest way to start one’s day. Were we nuts? It occurred to me that perhaps I, as the architect of this panel, was certifiable. Surely speech stereotyping was the most contentious thing I could have selected as a presentation topic. Here I was, plunging in where angels fear to tread, and I’d dragged four innocent colleagues in with me. What had I done? How had we landed here? The genesis of the panel was a simple question that has occupied me almost as long as I’ve been coaching accents and dialects: Can speech stereotypes be used for good rather than evil—and if so, how? I knew what I thought about this, but not what others in my field might think. Occasionally aspects of the subject would come up on VASTAVox in regard to a specific production, or as a tangent on another thread; but as a topic on its own, I didn’t think it had been all that well explored. So, I proposed the panel because I wanted to go to this panel—and nobody else was doing it. The VASTA 2012 Conference theme was “A Voice for Good,” which seemed to present the perfect opportunity. Somebody must have agreed—we were on the schedule. My brave panelists came aboard in different ways. Two of them were friends of long standing (thanks to VASTA), whose work I was pretty familiar with, and I had invited them directly. Eric Armstrong regularly provides extremely well argued, thoughtful, and sensitive arguments in response to my often less-measured statements on the Vox. I’ve benefited from that encouragement to think things through again. Doug Honorof is, if anything, even more of a pragmatist than I am, and given his work as an improv comedian, I thought his views might provide an interesting counterpoint to Eric’s. Like Eric, he has shared his expertise with me whenever I’ve sent out a call for help.