Two Sides of Intelligibility: The Practice and Perception of Performed Accents Onstage
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Date
2022-02-18
Authors
Kress, Ellen
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
The profession of voice and dialect is built upon the premise of maximum understanding for the audiences attending theatre. This maximum understanding, or intelligibility, has historically driven the practice and continues to shape the profession today. Intelligibility has been used as an objective measure for countless performers throughout the history of performance. However, intelligibility may not be an objective threshold of listening, but a socially constructed term used for both the practice and perception of voices onstage. The work of this dissertation unpacks the idea of audience intelligibility from two perspectives—a critical examination of the relatively short history of the profession of voice and dialect in English-speaking countries, and an empirical investigation into the audience’s role in building intelligibility for actors. Intellgibility is in fact susceptible to social structures and individual’s preconceived normative ideas towards language.Analysis in the history of voice and dialect reveals two recurring goals throughout the past two centuries. One goal of the practice was to eliminate any non-standard language usage in actors and students, to eliminate and traces of linguistic lived experiences for students onstage. The second goal is to replace these non-standard language varieties with sanitized or stereotyped versions of acceptable language varieties, appearing as either a general standardized accent, or stereotypical versions of foreign or regional dialects.
The main results of the series of linguistic experiments appear in three main themes. The first main theme is the context of language (e.g., listening to a performance) will necessarily change how listeners perceive language. The second theme is that there are multiple ways to achieve maximum constructed intelligibility, which makes way for more diverse voices in performance. The third theme uncovers the ambiguous relationship between authenticity, imitation, and stereotype, which leads to bigger questions of the role authenticity continues to play in performance.
I then offer modifications to a profession by taking seriously the notion of intelligibility as a socially constructed judgment that has a real-world effect on perception. The findings from the history and the experiments contribute to my position about the state of contemporary voice and dialect practices. I use the findings from the body of this dissertation to grapple with my own position as a white theatre maker and advocate for practices that respect the linguistic autonomy of students and actors while honoring the needs of theatrical production.
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Keywords
actor training, audience studies, dialect, language perception, linguistics, performance