I had this really awkward experience
yesterday, I was at one of my favourite places in Oakland, where we live,
Mariposa Bakery, gluten free bakery, I go there all the time.
And, of course, I'm wearing my mask, as we
do, and the person behind the counter is wearing her mask, as she does every day.
And I said, "I'd like a bear claw, please."
And she said, "Sorry, can you repeat that?"
And I said,
"I'd like a bear claw, please."
And I could see her eyes above her mask
starting to slightly panic as she realized she had to ask me again what I'd said.
And she did ask me again.
And then finally I said, "I'd like a bear claw, please"
really loudly and in a somewhat exaggerated accent.
And she said, "Oh, a bear claw, okay," but she was, at this point, really quite nervous.
And I was feeling so awkward and I said,
"Sorry, it's my accent. It's not your fault."
But the problem with the mask was I
don't think she could even hear that I had an accent.
And so she didn't know how to contextualise me.
And this often happens in, say, coffee places where I have come to realize.
I have to say, "Could I have some..." Wait a minute.
I almost said it wrong.
Normally, I would say, "Could I have some water, please?"
But that, just again, I'm asked two times to repeat myself.
So I finally go, "Could I have some water, please?"
So I was also talking this weekend about
accents with a colleague who's also a voice professional in the U.K. and we
were really aligned in having had this experience of working with people
on changing their accent and seeing the pain that people go through
when they're trying to completely erase, transform their accent.
And for both of us, it really brought forth a strong
belief that it is better for people to learn to modify or clarify their accents
in certain settings and to absolutely stay true to the accent that they use
with friends and family and their community of origin when they're with those people.
So I raised the idea of code switching, which is a term that's in a lot of use
where I live, but it's not a term used everywhere.
And what it really points to is choosing to change how you speak,
whether dialect, slang, when you're in settings outside of your
comfort zone, outside of your community of origin.
And you might do this when you are feeling
other in some ways in the arena in which you're communicating.
So you might be doing this because of race.
You might be doing it because of culture, language, all of the above.
And I think it's really about you feeling
comfortable, because I felt very uncomfortable in that situation.
And as it happened, the person opposite me
also felt uncomfortable asking me to repeat myself.
I think that we can create
authentic personas in different environments that we're in that feel most
comfortable to us while still staying true to who we are.
So when I work with accent with people,
I might encourage them to slow down and elongate the vowels that they have.
And those vowels might be very central to their accent.
So they're not changing the vowels.
My son, who is Latinx,
grown up in East Oakland and then obviously he's my child as well,
so he has an English background too.
Grew up with two parents who have different accents from each other
and different accents than the environment they're in.
And then he was in a community of kids
whose parents were mostly Spanish speaking at home.
And so he code switches all the time.
I hear him speak one way with friends
from high school, another way with the international
students at college for whom English is not a first language.
Then he will
play around a lot with language at home and he'll come out in the morning and go,
"All right, Bruv," because he's following English
YouTubers,
and that's part of his cultural heritage as well.
And then sometimes he will also speak Spanish when he needs to.
So these are things that can become very liberating and freeing or they can feel
oppressive and it depends how we work with them and how we hold them.
I'd love to hear your comments on your own experience with this.
I meet and work with people who have many different accents, cultures of origin.
What's been your experience and how do you
feel about switching how you speak in different environments?
Here's to unlocking your performance power.