Dialect Coaching for Actors

Whether you're exploring a new accent or improving upon one you've looked at before, I’m here to help you master it with confidence.

Different actors have different approaches to accent work, and I tailor my methods to meet your specific needs. Our work may touch on the 4 P's of accent work:

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Posture – How does your mouth feel when you do this accent? Accents all have a particular vocal tract posture – a series of physical tendencies for the muscles of the lips, jaw, tongue, soft palate etc. which we can think of as the home base for the accent – it’s the glue that holds all of the sounds together. Feel like you’re hitting a lot of the words accurately but it doesn’t feel comfortable or isn’t quite sitting together? Then you’re probably not in the right vocal tract posture for this accent. If there is an accent that you can do very well then you will have found some of the postural features of that accent (perhaps the jaw tends to open quite wide, perhaps the lips tend to round quite a lot, perhaps quite a lot of air tends to come through the nose so that we get a fairly nasal quality etc.)

 

Prosody - the music of the accent. What feels prominent musically and rhythmically about this accent? Does it tend to use major or minor intonation patterns. Is stress made by changing the pitch or changing the volume and duration of the stressed syllable?

 

Pronunciation - the sounds that are used and the distribution of these sounds within the accent. This work may include work on lexical sets and some very light International Phonetic Alphabet work - we will mainly focus on listening to and understanding the physical reality behind the sounds and their distribution throughout the accent. Sounds and any symbols that we use to describe these sounds are after all just a by-product of a physical speech gesture – through a combination of mimicry and awareness of what is physically happening to produce a sound we can get to accurate targets much more quickly.

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People - the cultural context.  Accent and Identity are strongly interlinked and so it is vital that we make an effort to understand the people whose accents we are taking on otherwise we can risk falling into stereotypical and possibly even offensive imitations.

 

There is a secret but vitally important fifth P- Performance. Until we start acting through accent we are just doing a party trick. We want to have our accent work embedded deeply so that whilst we are performing we aren’t thinking about the accent – if the character isn’t self-conscious about their speech then the actor shouldn’t be either- if we are , (and especially if we are working on screen ), the camera will see it. 

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I have worked extensively with established actors, award winning actors, drama students and accent modification clients from all over the world. So far I have coached people towards or from: Standard Southern British English/Modern RP,  Cockney, Estuary, Essex, Multicultural London English, Traditional RP, Heightened RP, North Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, Sheffield,  Hull, Mancunian, Bolton, Lancastrian,  Black Country, Brummie, Geordie, Scouse, Bristolian, Sussex, Suffolk, Cornwall, General American, New York,  Alabamian, AAVE, Bostonian, Virginian, Georgian, Dublin, Belfast, Mayo, South Wales, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glaswegian, Jamaican, Australian, Thai, Polish, Romanian, Hebrew, Russian, French, Italian, Austrian, Spanish, Swedish, Icelandic, Nepali, German, Greek, Mandarin, Cantonese, Tamil, Yoruba, Nigerian and Zimbabwean.

 

You can find further information about my experience and training on the page "My Background"

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I am a Knight Thompson Speechwork certified accent coach and I teach/have taught accents and production coach across BA, MA and MFA acting courses at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA), at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts, at the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts (ALRA North and South), at Empower School of Acting, Emil Dale, at Millennium Performing Arts and at Rose Bruford College.

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TV and Film production coaching includes:
 Wheel of Time III (Amazon), Toxic Town (Netflix – dialect prep), Crookhaven (BBC – dialect prep), The Hardacres (Channel 5 – dialect prep), Eklo - I (Nepal sci-fi movie), Untitled film with Lennie James (dialect prep), Honeywell (independent feature – dialect prep), Emmerdale (ITV – dialect prep), Andor II (Disney – shadowing dialect coach Naomi Todd)

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Theatre and Audio production coaching includes:

Witness for the Prosecution (West End – dialect prep), The Woman (Birmingham Rep & UK tour – dialect prep), Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Chance Theater, California – dialect prep), Paddington Lo-Commotion (Blenheim Palace), Bad Seed (Audible), Miss Julie, King Charles III, A Monster Calls, Three Sisters, The Dog in the Manger, The Erpingham Camp, The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs (LAMDA), Everlasting Lily (Associated Studios)

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Coached actors including:

Shohreh Aghdashloo (Emmy winner and Oscar nominee)
Kate Fleetwood (Tony nominee)
Abdul Salis (Love Actually, F1, Mufasa: The Lion King)
Meera Syal (BAFTA Fellowship)

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For those of you looking for further resources and recommendations for developing your accent work you will find many suggestions on the page "Learning Resources"
 

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My rates are £75 per hour or £105 for an hour and a half.

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