Phonetic Pillows Internationa Phonetic Alphabet

PHONETIC PILLOWS

The Phonetic Pillow approach to speech reflects my conviction to train actors as sensualists who passionately, incisively, viscerally, bring the playwright's words to life, driving the action of the play and causing the listener to identify and empathize. I find written phonetic symbols an incomplete, unsatisfactory tool to accomplish this type of training. One dimensional phonetic symbols, printed on paper tell our eyes what sounds they represent, tell our ears what sounds we are expected to utter, but make little or no appeal to our imaginations, or, indeed, our bodies (aside from our articulators). In an effort to bring phonetics into the same physical world as other performance classes I have worked with student actors for many years on ways to get the symbols to jump from the page, enter our bodies and demand us to express them. The greatest dramatic

story-tellers, from William Shakespeare to Caryl Churchill require us to have much more than a good ear for language; they write for and from the sensorium; the entire body of nerves that stimulates sensual response. Their writing challenges actor and audience alike to vibrate with ideas, conflicts and passions form head to toe. The Phonetic Pillow course aims to teach the actor to be ultra-verbal: to simultaneously experience language in tactile, auditory and imagistic ways; indeed, to savor the tastes and smells of language.

The inspiration for Phonetic Pillows is Kristin Linklater's Sound & Movement progression, which traces language from the most primitive impulse to Shakespeare's heightened texts. Using various games, some borrowed from Llinklater, I introduce students to the International Phonetic Alphabet, in the form of symbol-shaped pillows. Preliminarily, I propose that each pillow actually vibrates with the sound it represents, and further, that these sounds

have the power to move the bodies of the students. With this initial, imaginative leap, students see, touch, and give expressive voice and physical gesture to each phoneme. The work is at once, emotive and precise, analytical and action-based. I don't ask students to model the shapes of the symbols with their bodies, but, rather, to allow their bodies to be moved by sound itself. You might say to abstract sounds in their bodies. But they don't merely splatter sound around the room; they use sound as a fuel to fulfill the desire to communicate.

In the early work, the studio comes alive with a cacophony of raw sounds, as students randomly encounter phonetic pillows and express the sounds to each other. But out of chaos comes order as the pillow exercises continue, students fine-tune articulation with a profound interest in the precise formation and unique characteristics of each phoneme. The ear is trained, but never at he exclusion of the other senses. In fact, I often instruct students to feel the sound rather than hear it. Because Phonetics is actor's work, it is, necessarily, playful. The process, often fun, is also extremely demanding of the voice and body. It is an arduous, exhilarating adventure in which the student re-experiences language with an infant's acquisitive curiosity. It is a rediscovery of the myriad sounds that, in earliest life, twitched, shook, rolled and twisted through

the body. The Pillow class also addresses the conventional requirements of a Phonetics course, such as sound/symbol identification and phonetic transcription. There are specific pillow games for exploring and rehearsing texts, and for analyzing and acquiring dialects. Ample time is spent alternating between the physical experiences with pillows and writing down what the body remembers. In a typical session, the students use pillow exercises to warm up the voice/body connection, transcribe, in detail, their own speaking patterns and those of other people , practice reading their transcriptions aloud, and then, with renewed curiosity, dive back in to the visceral phonetic pillow games. Thus, they practice technical skills within the playful, imaginative milieu of the acting studio. By the end of the course, the student is primed to claim ownership of the language patterns demanded by playwright, character or dialect.

In addition to training acting students, I often give Phonetic Pillow workshops for teachers. Participants include college and university voice and speech teachers and occasionally, those in related fields such as speech therapy, speech pathology and secondary education. Dozens of professional training programs own a set of Phonetic

Pillows. The books, "The Joy of Phonetics and Accents," which outlines the approach, and "Bringing Speech to Life," the accompanying workbook have been adopted by many teachers over the years. Teachers have reported many positive outcomes for their students, including, an accelerated time frame for learning phonetic symbols, an increase in retention of the symbols, an increased connection to and vitality for language and a greater enthusiasm for the subject. Phonetic Pillows are handcrafted, and must be either custom ordered or homemade. Many schools have persuaded their costume shops to do the job.

For custom orders call:

(816) 419-6915

Testimonials:

"I begin my semester by teaching the IPA with Louis Colaianni's pillows. If you haven't seen these in use, get thee to a workshop. They are nothing short of miraculous. The students love them. Where in the past, students would groan on IPA days, now they moan when I don't bring them to class."
--Rinda Frye, University of Louisville

"Anderson and Colaianni, by inviting rather than prescribing, by exploring rather than standardizing, by playing rather than fixing and by encouraging rather than judging, allow the speaker to engage creativity, imagination and joy, in Bringing Speech to Life."
--Bonnie N. Raphael, PhD., University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

"The Phonetic Pillow approach transforms learning the IPA from a rigid 'chalk marks and memorization' approach to a visceral stimulation of both voice and body."
--Patrick Gagliano, Newberry College

"This work will now be a standard part of the curriculum of my class. The physical use of the pillows lessens considerably the students' self consciousness and inhibition and considerably extends their range and heightens their freedom and sense of play."
--William J. Johnson, University of California-Chico

"The students found such a sense of freedom and connection with the pillows. The pillows turned into beings with personalities. They gave the actor permissions to find out the emotional-physical edge to the sounds and the texts."
--Dale Genge, Studio 58, Vancouver, BC.

"This organic approach to speech allows the formation of sound to come from all of me, not just my lips, teeth and tongue. I cannot imagine learning speech by any other method."
--Leigh Smiley Grace, School of the Arts, Philadelphia

"Louis's right-brain method brought me up to speed in almost no time!"
--Kathy Hargreaves, Actor

"A concrete, practical and indispensable method."
--James Yaegashi, Actor

HOME

BIO

PHONETIC PILLOWS

PHOTO GALLERY

CONTACT ME