Verse English Rhythms and Syntactical Embodiment (VERSE): Applying findings from English literature to the work of voice coaches.

Jenny Grober, PhD Candidate KCL, English Literature by Research

Anne Whitaker, Lecturer in Voice, Royal Central School for Speech and Drama

Discussion, Workshop, Q&A/Reflective Plenary

This collaborative and interdisciplinary approach builds on the wealth of resources available for voice coaches and actors, but grounds it in the work of English Literature experts and cognitive musicology. This interdisciplinary approach allows us to address some of the issues with contemporary drama training including reductive cliches (iambic pentameter as the heartbeat or breath), overreliance on ‘image’ work (as opposed to aural), and the conflation of beat prosody and accentual stress.

We want to develop a teaching method, for use in both drama and English classrooms, that first prioritizes students’ sense-making and views rhythm subsequently as an interaction between the speaker’s syntactical ‘sense’ and the verse’s metre. Building on work by Derek Attridge, Robert Stagg, and recent work in cognitive musicology, we encourage students and actors to explore their unique and diverse linguistic expressions of syntax. Framing syntactical stress and accentual stress as independent phenomena, we then examine how these decisions interact with the formal accentual ‘verse’ through an experimental exercise engaging with polyrhythms.

Cognitive linguists Hamutal Krenier and Zohar Eviatar have positioned prosody as an embodied measure of syntax. With an understanding that verse and syntax are inextricably linked, we propose to explore a workshop process focused on the prosodic elements of pitch and rhythm as an embodied means of sense-making.

Jenny Grober (she/her) is a PhD Candidate at King’s College London, writing on the impact of the scientific revolution on changing verse forms across the seventeenth century. She received an MPhil in Medieval and Renaissance Literature from Cambridge in 2022 and a BA in Theatre from UC, San Diego in 2016. She is interested in the intersection of theatre, cognitive history, the history of science, and early modern prosody. She is the artistic director of Encounters Theatre Company and has worked as a theatre director and educator since 2016 specializing in immersive adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. Her resume includes work at Five Towns College, Santa Cruz Shakespeare, Hamlet Isn’t Dead, Barefoot Shakespeare Company, Company of Fools, La Jolla Playhouse, and Cherry Lane Theatre. She is also the director of The King is Dead, a short film written by Gabriel Cruz.

Anne Whitaker (she/her) works as a voice coach professionally and in training programmes at The Royal Central School for Speech and Drama, Mountview, and The Globe. Her research specialism is in prosody, the musicality of language. Her work with Beatrice Szczepek Reed, King’s College, will be published through Routledge as a workbook for actors called The Responsive Voice. Anne also works on prosody in verse text with PhD Candidate Jenny Grober, King’s College/Shakespeare Centre London. Recent theatre and film credits include Drops of God (Apple TV), Talamasca (AMC), Stranger Things: The First Shadow (Phoenix Theatre), Matilda (Cambridge Theatre), Shooting Hedda Gabler (Rose Theatre), We Were the Lucky Ones (Hulu), and Wheel of Time (Amazon).