Don’t Skim Over Text. The Organization of Language: From Rhythm to Meaning

Deb­o­rah Carl­son of Word of Mouth Stu­dios has started run­ning us through some sur­pris­ingly help­ful and insight­ful exer­cises designed to make us more aware of the rhythms inher­ent in lan­guage pro­duc­tion, i.e., what’s nat­u­rally pro­duced as human beings speak.

This is actu­ally a HUGE topic — just type in “rhythm lan­guage” in gog­gle, and you’ll pull up links to 100’s of research groups and labs in major uni­ver­si­ties all over the planet, not to men­tion links to lit­er­ally tens of 1000’s of research arti­cles and books on the topic. The rela­tion­ship between lan­guage and thought is one of the main ques­tions today dri­ving research in the area of Com­plex Sys­tems and Brain Sci­ences.

For my pur­poses, how­ever, the exer­cises we’re doing really derive from the foun­da­tional work of Edith Skinner’s Speak with Dis­tinc­tion: The Clas­sic Skin­ner Method to Speech on the Stage (Applause Act­ing Series) — one of the very first “act­ing” class I ever took at HB stu­dio — but Word of Mouth Stu­dios has taken it all a step further.

What To Do When You First Get a Script | How to First Work Text

It would be eas­ier to show rather than describe or tell, but I’ll do my best. Let’s take a cou­ple of sen­tences from John Patrick Shanley’s Where’s My Money:

Man­hood … It’s a job. Done right, it’s tir­ing job, and women have a lot to do with what that entails.

There is a ten­dency for inex­pe­ri­enced actors (like me) to make a deci­sion about the character’s atti­tude, or to make a deci­sion about what the char­ac­ter is “feel­ing,” as the char­ac­ter speaks the line. Some­times this is called “mak­ing a choice.”

Too often, how­ever, this will result in “skim­ming” over the line quickly because the actor is focus­ing on what they they “think” is going on inside the char­ac­ter as they speak the line.

This often changes the “mean­ing” of the line, sub­sti­tut­ing what the char­ac­ter is really doing for what the actor thinks the char­ac­ter is doing. The actor can some­times give a weird or even con­fus­ing line read­ing because they are not pay­ing atten­tion to the inher­ent rhythms in the text.

So, what are rhythms, why are they so impor­tant, so crit­i­cally impor­tant, to pay atten­tion to in the text? They’re crit­i­cally impor­tant because that’s where the struc­ture is, where the mean­ing is found.

There is noth­ing to fig­ure out or — worse – choose, invent or make up about what’s going on in the line. The first thing you do is sim­ply see, observe, under­stand the mean­ing that is already there, in the line.

The first thing I do with this line is break it up into it’s parts, it’s small­est mean­ing­ful phases, e.g.,

1. Man­hood
2. It’s a job.
3. Done right,
4. it’s tir­ing job,
5. and women
6. have a lot to do
7. with what that entails.

If you’re famil­iar with the work and writ­ings of Patsy Roden­burg, you can think of this as the jour­ney of the thought — there’s essen­tially one  “thought/idea/point” here, but with 3 twists in it.

There’s noth­ing espe­cially tech­ni­cal, tricky, or dif­fi­cult about this — as a native Eng­lish speaker/reader, you nat­u­rally parse each sen­tence that you hear or that you read into it’s mean­ing­ful parts. Your brain does this because it’s an early first step in sim­ply under­stand­ing what’s been said.

Any­way – hav­ing now the jour­ney of the thought, the rhythm of the text, I sim­ply apply what I’ve learned about stay­ing on the text, and I read each part, tak­ing an easy breathe between each part.

If I breathe and stay on the text, I’ll sound like I know exactly what “I’m” talk­ing about: it’ll have mean­ing and struc­ture. It’ll sound “right,” but not because I’ve cho­sen a mean­ing or an atti­tude or a feel­ing: I’ve sim­ply given breathe to each part and I’ve used what I’ve learned about stay­ing on the text in order to allow the native struc­ture that’s already present in the text to come though — stay­ing on the text takes me out of the way of what the lan­guage is nat­u­rally doing.

This is the start (only the start) of find­ing the character

You begin to char­ac­ter­ize when your breath pat­tern fits the rhythm of the piece.  If you don’t breathe the rhythm you can’t char­ac­ter­ize.  Every­thing will sound the same.

This is how you dis­cover the char­ac­ter in the text, in the writ­ing, and the nat­ural struc­tures in the text, the rhythm of the text, are the con­straints the lan­guage puts on you to help you dis­cover the char­ac­ter, dis­cover what they’re doing.

You don’t “make a choice.” You find the choice that’s already there.

Once you’ve got this, you’re directable For exam­ple, the direc­tor could tell you — OK, you’re talk­ing to your friend, explain­ing the “facts of life” to him, and he’s just not get­ting it, and you’re frustrated.

Or — say the line like your a father talk­ing to his young son. The color of the line, the con­text, can change, but the basic mean­ing of the line is constant.

If you miss the basic mean­ing of a line, and you do that through­out an entire scene or play, no amount of tal­ent or feel­ing will help you or the poor audi­ence because you won’t be doing the play. In other words, the audi­ence won’t under­stand what you’re say­ing because you don’t under­stand what you’re say­ing.

So, the bot­tom line. If you’re speak­ing & breath­ing the nat­ural rhythms of the lan­guage, you’ll auto­mat­i­cally be express­ing the mean­ing and struc­ture of what is said because you’ll be dis­cov­er­ing them as you speak.

While this isn’t all there is to act­ing, this is where you much start. All else, e.g., given cir­cum­stances, spe­cific rela­tion­ships, etc., all will shape and color the basic mean­ing. Your cre­ativ­ity and per­son­al­ity will give the basic mean­ing nuance and color, but the basic struc­ture remains because you’ll always be sup­ported by the text..

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If you need more con­vinc­ing that struc­ture and mean­ing are expressed in the rhythm of the text, then read on…

Babies bab­ble in sign lan­guage too — Babies of hear­ing par­ents start to bab­ble at a very early age. Some devel­op­men­tal lan­guage researchers think chil­dren are sim­ply exer­cis­ing the motor responses that under­lie speech pro­duc­tion, i.e., they’re sim­ply learn­ing to adjust the open­ing and clos­ing of their mouths to make vow­els and con­so­nants by mim­ic­k­ing adults, but the sounds are ini­tially with­out meaning.

Other researchers, how­ever, think that infants are pick­ing up the inher­ent rhyth­mic pat­terns in human speech, and this lays the neural foun­da­tion that even­tu­ally under­stand­ing lan­guage. It’s pos­si­ble that our adult brains can­not sep­a­rate rhythm and mean­ing, so if actor’s skim the text, ignor­ing the inher­ent rhythms, not only does the audi­ence have a harder time fol­low­ing what’s being said, they actors them­selves are prob­a­bly not fully appre­hend­ing the mean­ing of what the char­ac­ter is saying.

Dyslex­ics May Miss Rhythm of Sounds, Lan­guage — early think­ing about the nature of dyslexia focused on a person’s abil­ity to break down words into seg­ments or “phonemes” as they read. Recent research, how­ever, sug­gest that dyslexic kids are less sen­si­tive to rhythms in sounds.

Other research has found evi­dence that the pro­cess­ing of both music and lan­guage under­stand­ing depend on some of the same brain sys­tems.

All this strongly sug­gest that if you skim over the text, or slap an emo­tion or spe­cific atti­tude on top of the text, you won’t be mak­ing any deep sense of what you’re say­ing, and the audi­ence and the other actors won’t really under­stand or “get” you.

As a fas­ci­nat­ing aside, pars­ing a sen­tence into it’s mean­ing­ful “parts” is so fun­da­men­tal to under­stand­ing what’s being said or read, early AI researchers had to first tackle the pars­ing prob­lem before they could even attempt to build machines that could under­stand human lan­guage (they called it the prob­lem of con­cep­tual pars­ing).

The early his­tory of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gent lan­guage sys­tems has some hilar­i­ously spec­tac­u­lar fail­ures, but today, one com­pany claims to have solved the prob­lem of enabling com­put­ers to parse nat­ural human lan­guage: Lin­guis­tic Agents says it NanoSyn­tax tech­nol­ogy exploits the lat­est lin­guis­tics the­o­ries to achieve a “golden fleece” break­through that “was con­sid­ered by many to be impossible.”

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Tagged as: language, Patsy Rodenburg, scripts, Skimming, text