Greetings of the New Year.  I hope you've enjoyed your holidays, and are well on the way to keeping all of your New Year's resolutions.  If these include learning a new dialect or learning the neutral American accent, this issue of my newsletter will help by teaching you how to warm up some the muscles in your face and get them ready for speaking.

A Quick Mouth Warm-up:

Here are a few simple exercises you can do to get your mouth ready to speak.  It should take less than five minutes to do once you get the hang of it, and you may choose do it when you first get up in the morning, before an audition or presentation, prior to an important phone call, and anytime your mouth feels tense.

1.  Make some faces. Stretch out your mouth and face in ways you don't ordinarily.  Push your lips all around your face (without using your hands.)  Let your cheeks and eyes get into the act.  Try making a particularly gruesome face you've never made before.  Show it to your spouse, a friend or a nearby child.  Did you frighten them?  Well done.

2.  Stretch your lips using your pinkie fingers. Bend your smallest (pinkie) fingers into hooks.  Insert these hooks into the corners of your mouth, and pull your lips apart.  Pull up, pull down, pull all around and stretch your lips in opposite directions.  This is particularly good for relieving tension around the mouth, which many people feel when they get a bit nervous.

3.  Blow through your lips. Take a deep breath and close your lips lightly together.  Release the breath fairly aggressively through your mouth, and try to let your lips vibrate loosely.  You may sound like a horse.  This means you are doing this correctly.  If your lips won't vibrate, experiment with different amounts of lip tension and relaxation until you get some vibration.  Your lips need to be fairly relaxed in order to vibrate loosely:  If they're not, try repeating exercise #2 above.

4.  Add your tongue to the above exercise (Bronx cheer or raspberry). Why let your lips have all the fun?  Slide your tongue out onto your lower lip, relax it so that it's wide and fat and gently raise your lower jaw so that your mouth closes around your tongue.  Take a deep breath and release it through your mouth, letting the airstream vibrate your tongue and lower lip.  Experiment with different levels of lip and tongue tension till you get maximum vibration, and don't feel down-hearted if you don't get this right away.  A bit of trial and error will doubtless lead you to the ideal Bronx cheer (think Archie Bunker on All in the Family, though that show was actually set in Queens, New York.)

5.  Massage your masseter muscles. How's that again?  Press the fingertips of both hands into your palms.  Place the heels of your hands (the part now just below your fingertips) on the sides of your face.  Bite down on your back teeth, so that you feel your masseter muscles clench (these are the bunchy muscles you use to close your lower jaw, named for the Greek word for jaw, mastos; chewing is also called mastication.)  Relax your masseter muscles and massage them with the heels of your hands.  Rub them in a circle, pressing hard enough to cause a bit of pain.  We carry lots of tension in our jaw muscles and this is a good way to start to release some of that tension.  The American accent also uses some sounds that require the lower jaw to open quite fully and quickly (the vowel sound in cat, for example, as well as the first vowel sound in father.  If your jaw is relaxed and available, it will be easy for you to make these sounds and then move on to the next sound you need.

You may now want to put your newly-relaxed mouth to use by trying some tongue twisters. These may seem easy when you say them once, but try saying them three times and increasing the pace for more of a challenge.  You should also try to move your mouth as much as possible, while staying as relaxed as possible while you say these:

toy boat

rubber baby buggy bumper

red leather, yellow leather

eleven benevolent elephants

frogfeet, flippers, swimfins

Thanks and a tippo to Professor Dudley Knight at UC Irvine for this approach to tongue twisters.  These and more than 300 others may be found on the website for the 1st International Collection of Tongue Twisters.  You'll find a link for this excellent collection on my links page.

Repetition of a challenging set of sounds can also be highly effective for everyday phrases as well. If there's a word or phrase which is challenging for you to say, try saying it slowly so that all the sounds are in place, then say it a few times, gradually increasing the speed.  Your mouth will figure out what it needs to do to form the sounds, and after a few repetitions you should be able to say them with minimal effort.  Try this with world wide web  or any word or phrase that you find challenging.


How I spent my Christmas break:

Well, it wasn't as much of a break as I'd anticipated.  I was called to Las Vegas to dialect coach a new production of the ABBA musical, Mamma Mia, which will perform at the Mandalay Bay Resort.  I worked with American actors who are playing Australian and British characters, and will go back in a couple of weeks to give notes on a run-through.

I also started working with a young actor who appears on the CBS sitcom Still Standing.  He's from Texas, and the producers were hearing some of his Texas accent on the show, so I'm helping him be sure he sounds more neutral.  He's booked weekly phone sessions for the next two months, so we can go over his dialogue before he videotapes his scenes each week.

In the meantime, I started working with several new private clients, including a surgical resident from France who wants to be more easily understood in English, a Russian actor seeking to learn the neutral American accent and an American attorney who practices in England, and wants to learn an Oxbridge (Oxford and Cambridge) accent so that he doesn't stand out as a foreigner when in court.  He's making excellent progress after our first few sessions together, and we'll continue by phone now that he's gone to England.

Best wishes for the New Year, and please let me know if I may be of any assistance.

Joel Goldes
The Dialect Coach